I don't know what you're talking about. Linux doesn't require you to "tinker with drivers". Linux comes with the drivers for all the hardware it supports built-in. There is no tinkering required, the driver is loaded when you attach the hardware and is unloaded when you unplug it. This is a vastly superior model compared to the anarchy of broken, half-baked operating systems that require you to hunt the correct driver for each piece of hardware you own. Especially for people who need to get real work done. In Linux, the "tinkering" is only required if you're the unfortunate owner of a piece of hardware that requires a binary blob, such as an NVIDIA video card. Your complaints are to be directed to the manufacturer of that blob: Linux is not meant to be used that way.
High quality, unless you're an Optimus user (Linus' harsh words were the response to an angry Linux user who wasn't satisfied with her Optimus experience).
They admit themselves that they can't provide a proper Linux driver (as everybody else is doing these days) because they're more interested in reusing the Windows driver than in supporting Linux specifically. Talking about recorded history, do you remember when they didn't release specs for their *ethernet chip* years ago? I don't think there could be precious IP hidden there, or that they were interested in sharing some advanced Ethernet infrastructure between Linux and Windows.
In summary, I don't read all this love for Linux in their behaviour. If they care for Linux, then they care less than everyone else.
We have OpenGL to match MS' DirectX. We share the OpenGL baseline with anything not made by Microsoft (e.g. Android, iOS, OS X) and that's the API exposed by closed drivers, too, so I don't think you can say that *game developers* can't code on Linux because of the lack of a stable API for drivers; they're two completely different problems.
Saying that linux devs shouldn't have to budge at all and that the graphics manufacturers (who really don't need the currently tiny linux market at all) have to do all the work is ridiculous.
First, nobody said that graphics manufacturers have to do any work. As you know, linux devs have already done a reverse engineered driver for NVIDIA hardware without any help. Second, the Linux market isn't tiny at all if you consider that most of the Tegra hardware that NVIDIA sells will end up running Linux (for Android).
The example of AMD and Intel shows that the supposed problems about IP protection were little more than the FUD we all believed them to be.
In fact some are speculating that it's too late because the PC at home is dying to the tablet and smart phone.
I have to agree with you on that, and I deeply regret it, as I currently see no alternative to the PC and I'm afraid that we might end up in a world where all commodity hardware is of the "walled garden" kind. Looks like those in the "software is a tool" camp will finally get all the tools they seem to love so much; maybe they'll start to appreciate the value of open source again once they experience life without it.
Because every other OS, even though doing things in what you call "the correct way", is now either defunct or living in a niche. Linux is successful ONLY because it's open source.
The Linux community has no "whims" - they have even developed a working driver for NVIDIA products with no help whatsoever from them.
Why should the Linux community take the burden to design, maintain and upgrade a "stable API for drivers" only to bend to the desire of a company that by their own admission doesn't care about Linux? The GPL is a resource for Linux, not a problem to be firewalled. There's plenty of closed source OSes out there which are much easier to use than Linux. The only strength of Linux is its being open source. Making it a closed source OS would mean to saw off the branch on which it's sitting.
Ati learned the way of open source. Intel learned it even better. Nvidia doesn't want to? It must remain a problem of their own. The community has already responded to them with Nouveau.
Basically they're confirming Linus' words, not denying them. Linus never said that they don't make good drivers. He said that they suck at doing open source, which is an objective truth. Their response is that they do that because they don't want to invest resources to specifically support Linux. Which is exactly what Linus was upset about.
despite it running on the lowest end PCs of that era.
It required a 386 with 4 MB of RAM, and ran miserably slow on such a machine. In fact, I reckon that Doom marks the starting point of that era during which PC games became closer to tech demos rather than something funny to play; and to be properly played, they required a computer that costed twice the amount one could afford, and which would be worth one quarter of that price after a couple of months.
Any evidence can be planted, including DNA tests: pick up dropped cigarette, put it on crime scene.
Where I live, most homicides are driven by emotion rather than by criminal planning. This law would help in those cases. Even if it only did in a small fraction of them, it would still be a gain (I would certainly think so if I, or somebody I care for, were on the receiving side of the bullets).
Of course, it's up to the judges not to condemn somebody only on the basis of a single evidence.
But the trend is clear.
Moreover, the option to disable the so-called "secure boot" was only made mandatory at the last minute, AFTER the protests had sparkled against Microsoft. Their position during 2011 was "hey, we're not locking you out of your PCs, it's the OEMs that will do it". Without the public outrage, we would probably already have Microsoft-locked PCs now. I'll bet they'll try again at the next occasion, after the population has got used to having less freedom.
Trust me, I don't like either of them. But I'm more pissed about MS locking the PC platform because, well, to be honest it was the only truly open generic-purpose computer platform remaining. Microcomputers are no more. UNIX workstations are history. The Mac is going the way of the iPhone, and it never was open from an hardware point of view. We're risking to live in a world were the most open computing platform is... the chromebook, yuck! And only as long as those things keep having the freedom switch under their keyboards...
GP is perfectly right, if anything. Microsoft will control by default all bootloaders, and this event shows that Microsoft are unable to maintain their chain of trust. The fact that there can be (or not - cf. ARM) an undocumented, user-unfriendly, unspecified procedure to add other people's keys doesn't change a bit of that.
Who decides which patents are "obvious" and which patents aren't? In the USA, since it's impossible to decide what is an opinion and what is an insult, as a country you decided to have total freedom of speech. Which is the right thing to do to me. In the same way, patents should be abolished tout court. Afraid that the world might end because of this? Then we should start by progressively decreasing the patent expiration time and study if innovation is hindered or accelerated during the process. Same thing with copyright.
The situation changed from:
FOSS developers can develop whatever application they want for Windows without paying money
to:
FOSS developers can only develop applications for a feature-limited, performance-impaired subset of Windows, or they can pay a lot of money to continue doing what they were able to do before (at least until Microsoft removes the win32 interfaces from Windows, as they've done on the Arm architecture).
No, we already have the headers freely available in the platform SDK, we don't need to copy them. I'm talking about using the compiler binary, that is used internally by Visual Studio to compile Metro applications, by invoking it externally to build native ones instead. The compiler is proprietary software licensed through an EULA.
There never has been compiler tools out of Windows. You don't even need to be old to remember this
And perhaps I'm so old that I'm starting to forget things then, because I seem to remember that the official way to build Windows binaries was the Platform SDK ( / Windows DDK), that you could get for free from Microsoft. The news today is that future versions of the SDK will no longer include a compiler.
It's not a problem for me at all. I've never bought Visual Studio (although I did use VS.NET under the MSAA program), and I would never use the crippled free versions of VS that MS concede me when I can use the excellent tools that are available to me as free software.
It could be a problem for those who believed that Microsoft and open source could be conjugated together, but this is another question.
Here it's not a matter of money, it's a matter of openness. The deprecation of Win32, the arrival of the Windows store, the bootloader lockdown, now the deprecation of the Windows SDK - the direction that Windows is taking is clear (and it converges towards the same trail that Apple are following with OSX and iOS - but at least they still give a full development kit with their OS).
makes it sound like Microsoft is trying to kill FOSS
Which is exactly what they've been doing during all their history. FOSS developers can either be aware of this, stay away from them and be happy, or they can trust them every time they promise again that they've changed, that now they've embraced openness etc., and then get screwed by them once again when they show their true nature with moves such as this one.
People here are "crying" because Microsoft has stopped providing an official way for building native Windows applications without paying money. This is the news. The fact that there might be alternate development environments (which will always lag behind the official ones, even if you pay 1E+9 $ for them) or that you could hack your way into compiling a native application by extracting some compiler binary from some other Microsoft product (legally?) is completely secondary. What we are discussing here is this clear decision from Microsoft, whether you see it as a "fault" or not.
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I don't know what you're talking about. Linux doesn't require you to "tinker with drivers". Linux comes with the drivers for all the hardware it supports built-in. There is no tinkering required, the driver is loaded when you attach the hardware and is unloaded when you unplug it. This is a vastly superior model compared to the anarchy of broken, half-baked operating systems that require you to hunt the correct driver for each piece of hardware you own. Especially for people who need to get real work done. In Linux, the "tinkering" is only required if you're the unfortunate owner of a piece of hardware that requires a binary blob, such as an NVIDIA video card. Your complaints are to be directed to the manufacturer of that blob: Linux is not meant to be used that way.
They admit themselves that they can't provide a proper Linux driver (as everybody else is doing these days) because they're more interested in reusing the Windows driver than in supporting Linux specifically. Talking about recorded history, do you remember when they didn't release specs for their *ethernet chip* years ago? I don't think there could be precious IP hidden there, or that they were interested in sharing some advanced Ethernet infrastructure between Linux and Windows.
In summary, I don't read all this love for Linux in their behaviour. If they care for Linux, then they care less than everyone else.
Saying that linux devs shouldn't have to budge at all and that the graphics manufacturers (who really don't need the currently tiny linux market at all) have to do all the work is ridiculous.
First, nobody said that graphics manufacturers have to do any work. As you know, linux devs have already done a reverse engineered driver for NVIDIA hardware without any help. Second, the Linux market isn't tiny at all if you consider that most of the Tegra hardware that NVIDIA sells will end up running Linux (for Android).
The example of AMD and Intel shows that the supposed problems about IP protection were little more than the FUD we all believed them to be.
In fact some are speculating that it's too late because the PC at home is dying to the tablet and smart phone.
I have to agree with you on that, and I deeply regret it, as I currently see no alternative to the PC and I'm afraid that we might end up in a world where all commodity hardware is of the "walled garden" kind. Looks like those in the "software is a tool" camp will finally get all the tools they seem to love so much; maybe they'll start to appreciate the value of open source again once they experience life without it.
Whoops, s/Linux/Linus
Or the could sneak some ABI into the Linux kenel allowing them to continue using blobs as they do today.
The Linux community has no "whims" - they have even developed a working driver for NVIDIA products with no help whatsoever from them.
Yeah, you're right, who's this Linux Torvalds to judge who contributes to the Linux kernel and who doesn't.
Ati learned the way of open source. Intel learned it even better. Nvidia doesn't want to? It must remain a problem of their own. The community has already responded to them with Nouveau.
Basically they're confirming Linus' words, not denying them. Linus never said that they don't make good drivers. He said that they suck at doing open source, which is an objective truth. Their response is that they do that because they don't want to invest resources to specifically support Linux. Which is exactly what Linus was upset about.
Windows 3.1 required a 286 with 1 MB of RAM. Full disclosure: I had exactly that and wasn't happy for not being able to play Doom.
despite it running on the lowest end PCs of that era.
It required a 386 with 4 MB of RAM, and ran miserably slow on such a machine. In fact, I reckon that Doom marks the starting point of that era during which PC games became closer to tech demos rather than something funny to play; and to be properly played, they required a computer that costed twice the amount one could afford, and which would be worth one quarter of that price after a couple of months.
Any evidence can be planted, including DNA tests: pick up dropped cigarette, put it on crime scene.
Where I live, most homicides are driven by emotion rather than by criminal planning. This law would help in those cases. Even if it only did in a small fraction of them, it would still be a gain (I would certainly think so if I, or somebody I care for, were on the receiving side of the bullets).
Of course, it's up to the judges not to condemn somebody only on the basis of a single evidence.
But the trend is clear.
Moreover, the option to disable the so-called "secure boot" was only made mandatory at the last minute, AFTER the protests had sparkled against Microsoft. Their position during 2011 was "hey, we're not locking you out of your PCs, it's the OEMs that will do it". Without the public outrage, we would probably already have Microsoft-locked PCs now. I'll bet they'll try again at the next occasion, after the population has got used to having less freedom.
Trust me, I don't like either of them. But I'm more pissed about MS locking the PC platform because, well, to be honest it was the only truly open generic-purpose computer platform remaining. Microcomputers are no more. UNIX workstations are history. The Mac is going the way of the iPhone, and it never was open from an hardware point of view. We're risking to live in a world were the most open computing platform is... the chromebook, yuck! And only as long as those things keep having the freedom switch under their keyboards...
First they came for ARM on the desktop, and I didn't speak because I didn't care...
GP is perfectly right, if anything. Microsoft will control by default all bootloaders, and this event shows that Microsoft are unable to maintain their chain of trust. The fact that there can be (or not - cf. ARM) an undocumented, user-unfriendly, unspecified procedure to add other people's keys doesn't change a bit of that.
Who decides which patents are "obvious" and which patents aren't? In the USA, since it's impossible to decide what is an opinion and what is an insult, as a country you decided to have total freedom of speech. Which is the right thing to do to me. In the same way, patents should be abolished tout court. Afraid that the world might end because of this? Then we should start by progressively decreasing the patent expiration time and study if innovation is hindered or accelerated during the process. Same thing with copyright.
The situation changed from:
FOSS developers can develop whatever application they want for Windows without paying money
to:
FOSS developers can only develop applications for a feature-limited, performance-impaired subset of Windows, or they can pay a lot of money to continue doing what they were able to do before (at least until Microsoft removes the win32 interfaces from Windows, as they've done on the Arm architecture).
No, we already have the headers freely available in the platform SDK, we don't need to copy them. I'm talking about using the compiler binary, that is used internally by Visual Studio to compile Metro applications, by invoking it externally to build native ones instead. The compiler is proprietary software licensed through an EULA.
"Everybody else is doing it" is the criminal's defense.
And journalists striving to find excuses for the wrongdoing of the powerful are a signature of dictatorships.
There never has been compiler tools out of Windows. You don't even need to be old to remember this
And perhaps I'm so old that I'm starting to forget things then, because I seem to remember that the official way to build Windows binaries was the Platform SDK ( / Windows DDK), that you could get for free from Microsoft. The news today is that future versions of the SDK will no longer include a compiler.
It could be a problem for those who believed that Microsoft and open source could be conjugated together, but this is another question.
Here it's not a matter of money, it's a matter of openness. The deprecation of Win32, the arrival of the Windows store, the bootloader lockdown, now the deprecation of the Windows SDK - the direction that Windows is taking is clear (and it converges towards the same trail that Apple are following with OSX and iOS - but at least they still give a full development kit with their OS).
makes it sound like Microsoft is trying to kill FOSS
Which is exactly what they've been doing during all their history. FOSS developers can either be aware of this, stay away from them and be happy, or they can trust them every time they promise again that they've changed, that now they've embraced openness etc., and then get screwed by them once again when they show their true nature with moves such as this one.
People here are "crying" because Microsoft has stopped providing an official way for building native Windows applications without paying money. This is the news. The fact that there might be alternate development environments (which will always lag behind the official ones, even if you pay 1E+9 $ for them) or that you could hack your way into compiling a native application by extracting some compiler binary from some other Microsoft product (legally?) is completely secondary. What we are discussing here is this clear decision from Microsoft, whether you see it as a "fault" or not.
Does VS express' license allow this?