User space daemons for high level file system functions are nice. However, NFS is unnecessarily complex and limited for a user level file system programming interface.
It would be nice if Linux got some efficient, simple user-space file system support. Until then, I think the best bet is still to put things into the kernel.
Distributed stores that cannot be shut down or traced are important. But it seems to me that the Gnutella protocol has some serious problems with bandwidth management, security, authentication, and tracability. With the original Napster application, sharing MP3s, those where less important than when you start sharing executables and other content.
There are several open source projects already trying to develop cryptographically secure, robust, distributed file storage and web services. Why not try to help out with those?
Keeping it simple is generally good, but I think Gnutella is keeping it too simple.
I think the WinTerm story is full of contradictions.
First, there is the issue of cost. When I calculate the cost of deploying WinTerms, it doesn't seem any more cost effective than desktop machines, even if there were significant administrative savings.
Second, people wax ecstatic about ICA's performance over modems, yet it's supposed to be aimed at corporate networks, where performance at T1 Ethernet speeds matters much more. Good performance over modems does not imply good performance over Ethernet. In fact, at Ethernet speeds X11 seems to be performing better overall, and to offer ICA as an alternative to X11 seems like adding insult to injury.
Third, AFAIK, the ICA protocol is still proprietary. That means that if I invest any significant resources in building an ICA infrastructure, either in terms of software or in terms of hardware, I'm at the mercy of Citrix and its fortunes. And, frankly, I don't have much confidence in the future of Citrix: their fortunes are too closely tied to whether they cut into Microsoft's revenue stream, and Microsoft seems to be able to dictate to them whatever conditions they like. I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple of years, Microsoft will simply kill ICA and push only RDP. X11, Java, and other open technologies, on the other hand, have multivendor implementations, and no single company can make or break them (no, Sun can't really take back Java at this point).
Microsoft and Citrix came late to the thin client market with proprietary offerings that don't make too much sense to me financially, in terms of long term market viability, or in terms of performance.
Rather than investing a lot in ICA and RDP-based clients, I think companies should invest in thin clients that are based on open, well-documented standards like HTTP, HTML, XML, and Java. Let's not let Microsoft reinvent the 1980's all over again by saddling us with another decade of MFC-based "network" applications and another de-facto monopoly.
The term "thin client" is not specific whatsoever with Windows, Citrix, RDP, ICA, or any other proprietary technology. In fact, both Microsoft and Citrix were very late to the game: other companies had been making thin clients for years before.
Even for Windows, there are lots and lots of ways of building thin clients. X11 clones like RDP and ICA are not the only way.
Maybe Citrix has good reasons for wanting to build RDP/ICA-based thin clients. But if you talk about "thin clients", please don't talk as if Microsoft and Citrix invented the thing and were the only game in town.
Give the Mozilla group the benefit of the doubt. At least when it came to the layout engine and other core parts of the browser, they had to rewrite almost completely: it seems that the old code was very old, hacked up many times for ever changing standards, and probably simply not fixable.
I'm less sure about all the UI rewriting they did. It probably would have been better to use some cross-platform, Windows-like toolkit like wxWindows for the UI, at least for the first post 4.x release.
Improving the quality of USPTO patent examinations would represent some improvement--a number of the patents that have been granted simply have lots of prior art.
But I doubt this is going to address the fundamental problem: the USPTO has greatly expanded the fields in which patents are granted, to include software, business methods, and scientific data. This happened without direction by the legislature, and it represents a change from previous practices. This is particularly unfair because a number of the inventions that the USPTO granted patents on in the 1990s were already developed by practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s, but they couldn't apply for them then because the USPTO wouldn't have granted them then.
If you permit patents in these newly created areas of patentability, no amount of additional examination is going to address the underlying problem.
I also have my doubts that even "senior" examiners are going to be significantly more effective in weeding out patents with ample prior art, in part because the definition of "prior art" that the USPTO and courts apply seems to be very narrow. For example, patents like the shopping cart, e-commerce, on-screen television program grids, etc., have already been used for many years on the Minitel system, but I suspect that despite their technical similarity, courts and examiners would consider Minitel and the Web to be different uses.
Altogether, I don't see this announcement as much progress. I think it's pretty clear that Dickinson is doing it because he can use this as an argument to get more money and resources for his agency, a common goal of federal fiefdoms, not because anybody convinced him that something is wrong. If he gets the resources, he has more power and gets good PR out of it ("see, we are responsive"), and if he doesn't, he has an excuse for granting more bad patents ("if you had only given us more people").
Not to be misunderstood, given the current system, no matter what Dickinson's motivations are, more careful examinations are a slight improvement. But this doesn't address the underlying problems and issues at all.
You can put together systems that are as efficient, reliable, full-featured, and robust as Oracle or DB2 out of open source software. But it's a bit of work, it requires that you understand exactly what you are doing, and you are going to end up with a custom solution that you have to document and maintain yourself.
What sets Oracle or IBM DB2 apart is that they have large user communities, and that means a lot of people trained in using them, a lot of third party add-ons, a lot of "how-to" books, etc. The real selling point of the commercial enterprise level RDBMS systems is not software, it's market position and widespread use.
Whether that kind of support is something that matters to you enough to pay the steep prices that those systems cost, you have to decide for yourself.
The only system that comes close to Oracle or DB2 in terms of popularity is MySQL. If you can live with its limited feature set in your application, consider using it.
In the long run, hopefully some open source database will become as popular as the big commercial guys. The most likely path to that is no an Oracle clone, but the development of a new kind of database paradigm and popularizes it with an open source implementation.
I always preferred Fischer Technik (US distributor) to Lego. I think that, mechanically, the Fischer Technik set allows more interesting geometries and has better support for building assemblies with moving parts. Electronically, they came out with analog and digital control electronics and PC interfaces long before Lego. There are a number of links at here.
Fischer Technik has been used in engineering classes for a long time. I think the reason why it hasn't caught on as much in the US consumer market is because for many years they went more for functionality and less for appearance.
The kind of regulation you are assuming, that if someone hosts other people's content in good faith, they become responsible for removing that content if asked, is very sensible.
However, according to the summary, it doesn't just say that the content "becomes the responsibility of the webmaster", it also says that the person hosting the content can be imprisoned for six months. And it isn't clear how far the "responsibilty" of the web hosting company extends--would they be treated as if they had put up the content themselves, including criminal liability?
The implications may be fairly benign or they may be pretty serious. Someone with a better understanding of French law should look at it and explain its implications. But I don't think the law is as trivial as you interpret it to be.
Still, I also suspect that it isn't all that different from US practice. It's pretty easy to trace people through IP addresses and phone records. And you can bet that a hosting company that didn't keep log records and showed a pattern of hosting pirated data would be found liable by US courts. And if the US courts couldn't get them for that in a particular case, there are numerous examples where the police just wreak havoc on-site and confiscate equipment indefinitely "as evidence", which usually amounts to a pretty hefty punishment in itself. Give the French this: at least they spell out a policy that, for practical purposes, probably already exists in the US.
"These are the same arguments that were made in the early 1990s by people who were opposed to the patenting of software," [Friedman] says.
And what is that supposed to imply? That the change wasn't as harmful as opponents predicted? Actually, that conclusion is just wrong.
The software industry, so far, has developed spectacularly without software patents. The impact of the changes in the early 90's is only now beginning to be felt, and it is very negative: consolidation of companies because of patent issues, legal blackmail of startup companies because it's easier to pay a few percent than to fight in court, etc. Open source software projects, in particular, are at grave risk, because infringement is easy to claim based on the source code; most of the original Internet infrastructure was based on collaborative open source development and likely wouldn't have happened if software patents had been around.
But from the point of view of patent attorneys, the changes must have been a resounding success: so many more patent applications to be processed and so many more legal fees to collect.
This "everying is fine with software patents" attitude expressed by patent attorneys is in itself a good indication of how disconnected they actually are from policy and economic issues and how unqualified they are to determine policy in this area.
I'm not sure whether Americans realize how different the role of lawyers and law in the US is from most other places in the world.
Having lived in a number of different countries, my impression is that US laws are deliberately vague and that US administrative procedures involve an inordinate amount of legal procedures. Here are just some random examples I have come across:
In other countries, immigration applications don't usually involve lawyers. The criteria are spelled out pretty well, the options are fairly clear, and individuals are expected to submit their own applications, truthfully and unambiguously. In the US, immigration regulations are very vague, and for practical purposes, you must have a lawyer to stand a chance.
Traffic violations in the US involve the court system and legal proceedings. You can choose to represent yourself and perhaps get away with it, but fundamentally, those are legal proceedings. In Europe, in my experience, common traffic violations are administrative issues not involving courts or lawyers.
Consumer protection and product liability laws are so vague in the US that in any case involving substantial amounts of money, there will be a lawsuit that has some chance of success. Many other countries have much better defined rules and regulations that consumers and manufacturers can rely on, and they have efficient, standard ways of dealing with damages resulting from product liability and malpractice.
Although I haven't applied for international patents other than through a US patent lawyer, I doubt that foreign patent applications involve the kind of legal detail and legal involvement that US patent applications involve (and the responses from foreign patent examiners are definitely considerably more competent than those from US patent examiners). I also doubt that the intent of the US patent system was to involve patent attorneys to the degree that they are involved.
The power of the legal system and the police in the US concern me greatly. I think that in the long term, they endanger both the market economy and democracy. To be sure, I think that the legal system and the police are crucial parts of a market economy and a democracy, but they need to be in balance with other forces. In the US, I think this balance is eroding.
I can only guess at the reasons. A legal system like that in the US lets you avoid a lot of responsibilities if you only have enough money. Big companies can sue little companies out of existence, whether they have a case or not. If you are charged with a serious crime, a good legal team has a good chance of getting you off. And the people who write the laws are often lawyers, who probably think that adding more legal complexity (and revenue opportunities) is not such a bad thing. In short, having a complex legal system benefits the rich and the powerful, who can afford to navigate it.
So, where will it all go? Well, read up on your history. This kind of legalism has had ample precedent in world powers throughout history as they were passing their maturity. Stories of legal problems in the medieval Islamic world, China, or Rome all sound amusingly contemporary, and they amount to non-democratic abuses of power. I hope the US will be able to avoid the same fate, but, just in case, I'm keeping my options open...
"It's somewhat incongruous for a bookseller to be opining on the patent system," said William T. Ellis,
I find it somewhat incongruous for lawyers to opine on policy matters. "Booksellers" like Bezos are the constituency, beneficiaries, and subjects of the patent system. Economists and social scientists are qualified to make statements about the long term impact of changes to the patent system.
Lawyers? Lawyers are trained in the patent system as it is and its historical development. While those are interesting aspects of patents that are to be considered in any reform, they are hardly of primary importance. Lawyers also have a strong self-interest to generate legal fees from patent filing and lawsuits.
First we need to decide where we want to go as a society, then lawyers can help us translate that into legal language and enforce it.
Software like ChiliSoft's is important for Linux because it makes migrating from Windows to Linux easier.
If Cobalt keeps ChiliSoft's software proprietary and makes it available only with their own products, that limits the overall availability of that kind of software. It would have been better for ChiliSoft to remain a separate company and sell their product to anybody using Linux.
If Cobalt open sources or keeps selling ChiliSoft's ASP software to others, it's altogether good. That would make it easier for more people to move to Linux from Windows. If open sourced, people could also implement the ASP features that are missing from the product themselves.
I hope the latter will happen, and I think it would be in the interest of Cobalt anyway. Anybody who is going to deploy a large web site based on ASP is going to need something like Cobalt hardware. By growing the market, they can grow their own revenues.
Of course, in the big scheme of things, ASP is not all that great (neither are JSP or similar approaches to dynamic page generation). So, in the long run, I hope this sort of software will just go away completely.
I think this is really great news. Emulators are important because they will allow us to access current data and programs long past the time when the hardware that ran it has stopped being made. And putting Bochs under GPL or LGPL will likely cause it to be much more widely used and ensure long term maintenance and enhancements. Great job and kudos to both Kevin and the people at Mandrake!
I think to be a well rounded geek, you need both: hands-on practical experience with a variety of languages and systems and a deep understanding of theory and academic subjects.
Some CS curriculums really aim for that: they expose students to different subjects and languages in a seemingly haphazard way. That's the way to go. Others, of course, pick some kind of stream-lined path around what sells (Windows, VC++) or what is in vogue (Ada or Java or... to the exclusion of anything else). That doesn't prepare the students for the crazy and ever changing real world.
NeoMagic was doing the same thing: binary only releases of their X server. People explained to them why this didn't work: we may need to recompile the X11 server to get extensions to work, they may be out of sync with kernel distributions, they may not support the processors people are using, etc.
NeoMagic came around eventually. Hopefully, NVidia will as well. Explain to them politely, by E-mail, why it matters and don't buy their product until they come out with open source drivers.
Yes, I completely agree that there isn't enough innovation in GUIs on Linux. And I completely agree that it is time to move on.
But X11/Xlib isn't the culprit. X11 clearly is not the best thing since sliced bread. It's an old design, a bit clunky in places, and lacks antialiasing for low resolution screens. But the would-be X11 competitors for desktop applications don't aim much higher. And the clunkiness of the low-level X11 API is of little concern to programmers, since it's mostly hidden by the various toolkits.
The really important areas where Linux GUIs ought to innovate (but don't) are at the toolkit level. Well executed as they are, Qt and GTK+ are still MFC/toolbox-style, event driven, decades old technology. There are a lot more interesting and innovative ways of writing GUIs out there. Whether it's X11, GDI, Java, Berlin, SVGAlib, GGI, or anything else under the covers doesn't matter much.
While for embedded systems, getting rid of X11 makes some sense because of space constraints, trying to replace X11 on the desktop to me is just barking up the wrong tree. I'd much rather see some of that effort go into something like a desktop based on scalable UIs, notebook interfaces, transcript-based interfaces, or any of a large number of other interesting, innovative approaches to GUIs.
DPS and NeWS never worked as well or as efficiently as X11. In particular, for what really mattered--getting lots of data from the client to the display server--they are a lot worse than X11. X11 gives you memory mapped bulk data transfer on the local machine, and efficiently packed bulk data transfer to remote machines. That's really the best you can hope for.
As for writing window managers, if you think writing them under X11 is hard, try doing it sometimes under Windows or MacOS. X11 at least delineates and defines responsibilities and puts the window manager in control. The fact that the protocol is complex is a result of the fact that there are a lot of complex interactions that can happen between different applications from different machines.
Qt and GTK can potentially "skip" X and present abstract graphics interface because they have restricted applications domains: they are GUI toolkits for Motif and Windows-like applications. arranged and communicate.
If you wanted to use a toolkit like Qt or GTK to replace X11 as a general purpose window system, you'd have to add a lot more functionality. And, in the end, you'd still end up with something that can't do as much.
Embedded versions of those toolkits are very useful. However, they are no replacement for a system like X11.
No, it wouldn't take a complete rewriting of the font code in X11 to get antialiased fonts. In fact, the existing font code should probably not get touched at all.
Antialiased fonts and drawing could simply be added as a separate extension, with a separate set of requests. That way, for example, the antialiased FreeType code could probably be dropped in without a lot of changes.
Whether to use antialiased operations probably should be left to high level toolkit libraries and/or applications, since it affects performance, color allocation, and color maps.
For the common cases, of course, low-level client libraries could try to map non-antialiased calls onto antialiased calls.
Qt is a proprietary toolkit. It may come with a more or less liberal license, but it's still owned and controlled by a single company. And, in fact, it appears that Troll Tech has opposed free reimplentations of Qt based on their API specifications in the past.
Two truly open source GUIs for embedded systems are MicroWindows and NanoGUI. You can find more information at http://microwindows.censoft.com/. There are lots of other GUI libraries that can access the frame buffer as well. A port of GTK+ to SVGAlib or libggi probably wouldn't be all that hard either.
X11 is still a great protocol for network transparent windowing: it's efficient, conceptually simple, and mature. In those areas where it really matters (bulk image and geometry transfer, 3D graphics) X11 already gives applications memory mapped access.
X11 does lack a few features, like antialiased drawing and fonts. Those can be added easily with X11's well-defined and widely used extension mechanism, and without breaking backwards compatibility. If you type "xdpyinfo", you'll see that you are already running a dozen or so extensions.
Using libraries that access the frame buffer directly does make sense for embedded systems, but for general usage, they would represent a big step backwards.
Yes, I think Mozilla is doing a lot of things right. It might simply become a PR problem if they call something "beta" that really isn't.
Of course, the Gecko layout engine seems much more stable than the rest, so maybe Netscape 6 will actually just use that. (Whatever happened to Gecko embeddings in Tk, GTK, and other toolkits?)
Slashdot Mirror
It would be nice if Linux got some efficient, simple user-space file system support. Until then, I think the best bet is still to put things into the kernel.
I recommend people take a look at the projects listed at http://www.cypherspace.org/links.html and http://freenet.sourceforge.net/.
There are several open source projects already trying to develop cryptographically secure, robust, distributed file storage and web services. Why not try to help out with those?
Keeping it simple is generally good, but I think Gnutella is keeping it too simple.
First, there is the issue of cost. When I calculate the cost of deploying WinTerms, it doesn't seem any more cost effective than desktop machines, even if there were significant administrative savings.
Second, people wax ecstatic about ICA's performance over modems, yet it's supposed to be aimed at corporate networks, where performance at T1 Ethernet speeds matters much more. Good performance over modems does not imply good performance over Ethernet. In fact, at Ethernet speeds X11 seems to be performing better overall, and to offer ICA as an alternative to X11 seems like adding insult to injury.
Third, AFAIK, the ICA protocol is still proprietary. That means that if I invest any significant resources in building an ICA infrastructure, either in terms of software or in terms of hardware, I'm at the mercy of Citrix and its fortunes. And, frankly, I don't have much confidence in the future of Citrix: their fortunes are too closely tied to whether they cut into Microsoft's revenue stream, and Microsoft seems to be able to dictate to them whatever conditions they like. I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple of years, Microsoft will simply kill ICA and push only RDP. X11, Java, and other open technologies, on the other hand, have multivendor implementations, and no single company can make or break them (no, Sun can't really take back Java at this point).
Microsoft and Citrix came late to the thin client market with proprietary offerings that don't make too much sense to me financially, in terms of long term market viability, or in terms of performance.
Rather than investing a lot in ICA and RDP-based clients, I think companies should invest in thin clients that are based on open, well-documented standards like HTTP, HTML, XML, and Java. Let's not let Microsoft reinvent the 1980's all over again by saddling us with another decade of MFC-based "network" applications and another de-facto monopoly.
Even for Windows, there are lots and lots of ways of building thin clients. X11 clones like RDP and ICA are not the only way.
Maybe Citrix has good reasons for wanting to build RDP/ICA-based thin clients. But if you talk about "thin clients", please don't talk as if Microsoft and Citrix invented the thing and were the only game in town.
I'm less sure about all the UI rewriting they did. It probably would have been better to use some cross-platform, Windows-like toolkit like wxWindows for the UI, at least for the first post 4.x release.
But I doubt this is going to address the fundamental problem: the USPTO has greatly expanded the fields in which patents are granted, to include software, business methods, and scientific data. This happened without direction by the legislature, and it represents a change from previous practices. This is particularly unfair because a number of the inventions that the USPTO granted patents on in the 1990s were already developed by practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s, but they couldn't apply for them then because the USPTO wouldn't have granted them then.
If you permit patents in these newly created areas of patentability, no amount of additional examination is going to address the underlying problem.
I also have my doubts that even "senior" examiners are going to be significantly more effective in weeding out patents with ample prior art, in part because the definition of "prior art" that the USPTO and courts apply seems to be very narrow. For example, patents like the shopping cart, e-commerce, on-screen television program grids, etc., have already been used for many years on the Minitel system, but I suspect that despite their technical similarity, courts and examiners would consider Minitel and the Web to be different uses.
Altogether, I don't see this announcement as much progress. I think it's pretty clear that Dickinson is doing it because he can use this as an argument to get more money and resources for his agency, a common goal of federal fiefdoms, not because anybody convinced him that something is wrong. If he gets the resources, he has more power and gets good PR out of it ("see, we are responsive"), and if he doesn't, he has an excuse for granting more bad patents ("if you had only given us more people").
Not to be misunderstood, given the current system, no matter what Dickinson's motivations are, more careful examinations are a slight improvement. But this doesn't address the underlying problems and issues at all.
What sets Oracle or IBM DB2 apart is that they have large user communities, and that means a lot of people trained in using them, a lot of third party add-ons, a lot of "how-to" books, etc. The real selling point of the commercial enterprise level RDBMS systems is not software, it's market position and widespread use.
Whether that kind of support is something that matters to you enough to pay the steep prices that those systems cost, you have to decide for yourself.
The only system that comes close to Oracle or DB2 in terms of popularity is MySQL. If you can live with its limited feature set in your application, consider using it.
In the long run, hopefully some open source database will become as popular as the big commercial guys. The most likely path to that is no an Oracle clone, but the development of a new kind of database paradigm and popularizes it with an open source implementation.
Fischer Technik has been used in engineering classes for a long time. I think the reason why it hasn't caught on as much in the US consumer market is because for many years they went more for functionality and less for appearance.
However, according to the summary, it doesn't just say that the content "becomes the responsibility of the webmaster", it also says that the person hosting the content can be imprisoned for six months. And it isn't clear how far the "responsibilty" of the web hosting company extends--would they be treated as if they had put up the content themselves, including criminal liability?
The implications may be fairly benign or they may be pretty serious. Someone with a better understanding of French law should look at it and explain its implications. But I don't think the law is as trivial as you interpret it to be.
Still, I also suspect that it isn't all that different from US practice. It's pretty easy to trace people through IP addresses and phone records. And you can bet that a hosting company that didn't keep log records and showed a pattern of hosting pirated data would be found liable by US courts. And if the US courts couldn't get them for that in a particular case, there are numerous examples where the police just wreak havoc on-site and confiscate equipment indefinitely "as evidence", which usually amounts to a pretty hefty punishment in itself. Give the French this: at least they spell out a policy that, for practical purposes, probably already exists in the US.
And what is that supposed to imply? That the change wasn't as harmful as opponents predicted? Actually, that conclusion is just wrong.
The software industry, so far, has developed spectacularly without software patents. The impact of the changes in the early 90's is only now beginning to be felt, and it is very negative: consolidation of companies because of patent issues, legal blackmail of startup companies because it's easier to pay a few percent than to fight in court, etc. Open source software projects, in particular, are at grave risk, because infringement is easy to claim based on the source code; most of the original Internet infrastructure was based on collaborative open source development and likely wouldn't have happened if software patents had been around.
But from the point of view of patent attorneys, the changes must have been a resounding success: so many more patent applications to be processed and so many more legal fees to collect.
This "everying is fine with software patents" attitude expressed by patent attorneys is in itself a good indication of how disconnected they actually are from policy and economic issues and how unqualified they are to determine policy in this area.
Having lived in a number of different countries, my impression is that US laws are deliberately vague and that US administrative procedures involve an inordinate amount of legal procedures. Here are just some random examples I have come across:
- In other countries, immigration applications don't usually involve lawyers. The criteria are spelled out pretty well, the options are fairly clear, and individuals are expected to submit their own applications, truthfully and unambiguously. In the US, immigration regulations are very vague, and for practical purposes, you must have a lawyer to stand a chance.
- Traffic violations in the US involve the court system and legal proceedings. You can choose to represent yourself and perhaps get away with it, but fundamentally, those are legal proceedings. In Europe, in my experience, common traffic violations are administrative issues not involving courts or lawyers.
- Consumer protection and product liability laws are so vague in the US that in any case involving substantial amounts of money, there will be a lawsuit that has some chance of success. Many other countries have much better defined rules and regulations that consumers and manufacturers can rely on, and they have efficient, standard ways of dealing with damages resulting from product liability and malpractice.
- Although I haven't applied for international patents other than through a US patent lawyer, I doubt that foreign patent applications involve the kind of legal detail and legal involvement that US patent applications involve (and the responses from foreign patent examiners are definitely considerably more competent than those from US patent examiners). I also doubt that the intent of the US patent system was to involve patent attorneys to the degree that they are involved.
The power of the legal system and the police in the US concern me greatly. I think that in the long term, they endanger both the market economy and democracy. To be sure, I think that the legal system and the police are crucial parts of a market economy and a democracy, but they need to be in balance with other forces. In the US, I think this balance is eroding.I can only guess at the reasons. A legal system like that in the US lets you avoid a lot of responsibilities if you only have enough money. Big companies can sue little companies out of existence, whether they have a case or not. If you are charged with a serious crime, a good legal team has a good chance of getting you off. And the people who write the laws are often lawyers, who probably think that adding more legal complexity (and revenue opportunities) is not such a bad thing. In short, having a complex legal system benefits the rich and the powerful, who can afford to navigate it.
So, where will it all go? Well, read up on your history. This kind of legalism has had ample precedent in world powers throughout history as they were passing their maturity. Stories of legal problems in the medieval Islamic world, China, or Rome all sound amusingly contemporary, and they amount to non-democratic abuses of power. I hope the US will be able to avoid the same fate, but, just in case, I'm keeping my options open...
I find it somewhat incongruous for lawyers to opine on policy matters. "Booksellers" like Bezos are the constituency, beneficiaries, and subjects of the patent system. Economists and social scientists are qualified to make statements about the long term impact of changes to the patent system.
Lawyers? Lawyers are trained in the patent system as it is and its historical development. While those are interesting aspects of patents that are to be considered in any reform, they are hardly of primary importance. Lawyers also have a strong self-interest to generate legal fees from patent filing and lawsuits.
First we need to decide where we want to go as a society, then lawyers can help us translate that into legal language and enforce it.
If Cobalt keeps ChiliSoft's software proprietary and makes it available only with their own products, that limits the overall availability of that kind of software. It would have been better for ChiliSoft to remain a separate company and sell their product to anybody using Linux.
If Cobalt open sources or keeps selling ChiliSoft's ASP software to others, it's altogether good. That would make it easier for more people to move to Linux from Windows. If open sourced, people could also implement the ASP features that are missing from the product themselves.
I hope the latter will happen, and I think it would be in the interest of Cobalt anyway. Anybody who is going to deploy a large web site based on ASP is going to need something like Cobalt hardware. By growing the market, they can grow their own revenues.
Of course, in the big scheme of things, ASP is not all that great (neither are JSP or similar approaches to dynamic page generation). So, in the long run, I hope this sort of software will just go away completely.
I think this is really great news. Emulators are important because they will allow us to access current data and programs long past the time when the hardware that ran it has stopped being made. And putting Bochs under GPL or LGPL will likely cause it to be much more widely used and ensure long term maintenance and enhancements. Great job and kudos to both Kevin and the people at Mandrake!
Some CS curriculums really aim for that: they expose students to different subjects and languages in a seemingly haphazard way. That's the way to go. Others, of course, pick some kind of stream-lined path around what sells (Windows, VC++) or what is in vogue (Ada or Java or ... to the exclusion of anything else). That doesn't prepare the students for the crazy and ever changing real world.
NeoMagic came around eventually. Hopefully, NVidia will as well. Explain to them politely, by E-mail, why it matters and don't buy their product until they come out with open source drivers.
But X11/Xlib isn't the culprit. X11 clearly is not the best thing since sliced bread. It's an old design, a bit clunky in places, and lacks antialiasing for low resolution screens. But the would-be X11 competitors for desktop applications don't aim much higher. And the clunkiness of the low-level X11 API is of little concern to programmers, since it's mostly hidden by the various toolkits.
The really important areas where Linux GUIs ought to innovate (but don't) are at the toolkit level. Well executed as they are, Qt and GTK+ are still MFC/toolbox-style, event driven, decades old technology. There are a lot more interesting and innovative ways of writing GUIs out there. Whether it's X11, GDI, Java, Berlin, SVGAlib, GGI, or anything else under the covers doesn't matter much.
While for embedded systems, getting rid of X11 makes some sense because of space constraints, trying to replace X11 on the desktop to me is just barking up the wrong tree. I'd much rather see some of that effort go into something like a desktop based on scalable UIs, notebook interfaces, transcript-based interfaces, or any of a large number of other interesting, innovative approaches to GUIs.
It's been done, and it's widely used: VNC. It's free, it's very useful, and there are some vendors now offering thin clients based on it.
As for writing window managers, if you think writing them under X11 is hard, try doing it sometimes under Windows or MacOS. X11 at least delineates and defines responsibilities and puts the window manager in control. The fact that the protocol is complex is a result of the fact that there are a lot of complex interactions that can happen between different applications from different machines.
If you wanted to use a toolkit like Qt or GTK to replace X11 as a general purpose window system, you'd have to add a lot more functionality. And, in the end, you'd still end up with something that can't do as much.
Embedded versions of those toolkits are very useful. However, they are no replacement for a system like X11.
Antialiased fonts and drawing could simply be added as a separate extension, with a separate set of requests. That way, for example, the antialiased FreeType code could probably be dropped in without a lot of changes.
Whether to use antialiased operations probably should be left to high level toolkit libraries and/or applications, since it affects performance, color allocation, and color maps.
For the common cases, of course, low-level client libraries could try to map non-antialiased calls onto antialiased calls.
Two truly open source GUIs for embedded systems are MicroWindows and NanoGUI. You can find more information at http://microwindows.censoft.com/. There are lots of other GUI libraries that can access the frame buffer as well. A port of GTK+ to SVGAlib or libggi probably wouldn't be all that hard either.
X11 does lack a few features, like antialiased drawing and fonts. Those can be added easily with X11's well-defined and widely used extension mechanism, and without breaking backwards compatibility. If you type "xdpyinfo", you'll see that you are already running a dozen or so extensions.
Using libraries that access the frame buffer directly does make sense for embedded systems, but for general usage, they would represent a big step backwards.
Of course, the Gecko layout engine seems much more stable than the rest, so maybe Netscape 6 will actually just use that. (Whatever happened to Gecko embeddings in Tk, GTK, and other toolkits?)