Intels spat is that they licensed their patented technology to VIA. VIA made changes that Intel disputed, so apparently, Intel has terminated their license, which means that VIA no longer has a legal right to use Intels patents.
With the license terminated, Via has nothing to sell to another company, because that company would then be violating Intels patents and could therefore not ship into the US, unless something gets overturned.
This is the same reason that US based PKI products use either Diffie Hellman or aquire a license from RSA. They can't just use an RSA implementation that was developed overseas and sell it here, because that would still violate RSA's original patent.
Expect to see a HUGE battle over this one. Via definetly is the ballsiest company to cross Intel's path in ages.
The last two yars Intel did all it could to avoid being marked a "monopoly", including licensing MMX and the P6 bus. Now that it's not called that, it can continue to compete "aggressively", which according to Intels playbook, includes revoking licenses it granted when it was under the DOJ's microscope.
This complaint is all about the P6 bus. AMD is exempt from all this whining. They signed away their ability to be slot compatible with Intel for a license to MMX. The only way that this could ever affect AMD is if they turned around and made Slot 1 Athlons.
For the most part, I think that people should stand up and be counted. But there comes a time when, on occasion, people choose, for whatever reason, that they do not want themselves associated with their words. Authors have pen names, for instance.
There are a lot of stories that cite annonymous sources in publications such as Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times that would have never seen the light of day if the correspondents were forced to reveal themselves.
Yes, AC's around here seem to be usually obnoxious, but obviously you've never made a comment around here that you thought was an insiteful bit and woke up the next day to find your mailbox stuffed with 50 messages all calling you a dipshit, or what not.
Freedom is a responsibility. I hope that we can be responsible enough that our right or ability to speak anonymously, without fear of retribution, is never taken away.
I hope no one comes along today and starts complaining about patents in this thread. Yes, some patents appear to be bogus (one-click shopping springs to mind) but this is a well deserved patent, in my eyes. After all, if cloning were a simple feat that didn't require years of research and millions of dollars in funding, then we'd have seen cloned sheep years ago, and cloned dinosaurs would be much closer to reality than they are today (which is pretty distant).
How do you propose that this would even be possible? One the internet, anybody can be anybody. Filthy old men can be 21 year old girls, FBI agents can be 6 year olds, and I can be a celebrity. Do you propose a lengthy interview process in order to get a slashdot account? Or rather than having a moderation threshhold, would you set your browser to ignore posts from people under the age of XX?
Of course, all the honest people will say exactly what they are, but all the people that know that they don't know jack will just be able to say that they're 35 year old Sys admins, 45 yr old DBA's, etc....
Next, you'll want posting of IP's or subnets... Make it easier to ignore people from AOL. Of course, that removes the ability to post annonymously, which is what freedom of speech is all about.
yes. I forgot the chip numbers, so you'll have to excuse me, but:
The 68000 could not use an MMU or FPU The 68020 could use an external MMU and FPU The 68030 had an integrated MMU and could use and external FPU The 68040 integrated both, with the exception of The 68LC040 had no FPU but a working MMU.
Back then amiga's were around, which could take advantage of MMU's, but I think most people saw them in Apple's machines. Their first ones were called 32-bit dirt, meaning that there were errors in the ROMs that didn't permit them to use 32 bit addressing, until (it think) connectix released Mode32. The result of that was the system SAW the memory above 8 MB, but wouldn't let you use it. It would just report all the extra memory as being allocated to the system.
They got their $100 million from people such as Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures among others. None of those financiers are going to invest that much money unless the business plan includes mention of the company going public. If he'd used any other words besides "rounds of financing" then i may have doubted it, but that's CEO speak for raising money prior to the IPO.
And yes, they won't have fabs. Is that good? That means that rather then themselves having to come up with the money to buy the fab (a material asset) they need to use that money instead to pay IBM (cost of sales). In the short term, it leaves them with more money in their pockets, but in the long term it means that there's an added expense that will get passed on (even though the price range is only 60-90 dollars.)
No offense to you or anything, but how in the world was that "interesting"?
The Crusoe does nothing for making the switch from Windows to Linux easier. Nada. Same for BSD, Be, etc... It does just as much as did the Athlon, except Crusoes effectively a version 1.0 product coming from a brand new company, as opposed to Athlong which is a much more matured product that merges the best of two already mature companies products.
Java shouldn't even be included in that discussion, unless a JVM is ported to run directly on top of Crusoe.
And of course any journalist worth their salt HAS to ask about IPO's. With Amazon's, Ebays, Redhats, VA Linuxs, etc, it's the simple truth that Transmeta will in all likely hood go public (they talked about who supplied their first round and second round of financing. The next logical step is to go public). That, plus the hype they've drawn to them selves, and the market they've painted for their processor.
Well, what about a Mixed mode solution, akin the the MacOS? Programs could run in translated mode at regular speed, and portions of them could be translated to the full VLIW instruction set. It semems that Crusoe is already dynamically recompiling x86 to it's own instruction set, so, with smarter compiliers coming (which intel is funding), wouldn't it only add to the performance?
After all, if intel's tools are indeed open-source, then it shouldn't be hard to add support for other VLIW instruction sets to the compiler. Of course, that would all hinge on Transmeta releasing the instruction set...
Nasdaq owns the ticker symbols. They aren't licensed to companies. And they can move them around as they see fit.
I think, but i'm not sure, that tickers can be 5 or 6 letters long... But maybe it's not nasdaq, but rather on the OTC bulletin boards.
I definetly think that no matter how much people slam LinuxOne, VA Linux definetly pulled the sleezier tactic by asking for LNUX. I have seen SO MANY articles about the Linux operating system that have hyperlinks cross-referenceing themselves to VA Linux.
Yes, it sounds like a kick ass product... I listened to the conference until my connection konked out around 1:05. But I was still hoping for more.
According to all the rumors I'd heard, this chip would be able to load many different instruction sets (PowerPC, SPARC, etc...) and always pretty much be running in a native mode.
Of all the complaints I've heard about x86 processors across the years, the one that sticks out the most is that they're a pain to develop for. This new chip does nothing to alleviate that.
In a way, transmeta's become like Be. Be originally set out to take over the world (or at least, the Mac OS market place), moved onto x86 and realized that can't beat Microsoft out of the market place, so they might as well try to co-habitate as well as they can. Transmeta has a really cool product, but has also realized that they can't really push intel out of the market place, so they might as well just aim for intel compatibility...
Too bad it sounds like they expect nothing to be written in Crusoe's native language... There must be some speed improvement that could be gained, if say, Crusoe's achieved 40% market share in the notebook market, that would make it worthwhile for developers to create Crusoe ports.
A company does not need to trademark their name in order to go public. Where did you think up that little rule? What you could do is go trademark LinuxOne for yourself, but guess what? LinuxOne could sue you and take the trademark from you, because they can obviously show prior use.
Come one guys. You don't like Linux One. They seem a little bit shady. So don't support them. But don't actively go trying to destroy the company. That's just immature, and with all the speculation that gets posted here, could almost be considered libelous.
Everyone deserves a fair shot. You may not agree with them. You may not like them. Blah blah blah. The bottom line is that maybe they will make good on their goals of becoming a real Linux company.
I couldn't see it, so i listened in on ZD Radio, but now it's 1 and Real Player says there's a problem with Net conjestion.... Thanks guys.
Anyways. Have they actually built any, or is all their information based on software simulations? Granted, the simulations can be pretty accurate, but then Intel thought that Merced was going to perform a lot better than it did when it reached silicon.
Listening to them describe videotaped presentations, though, doesn't sound very exciting. I wish they had a Crusoe motherboard/chip vs. P3, so it would be more first hand... After all - Microsoft has taught us not to trust video tapes any more....
So now they've finally announced confirmation that today is indeed the day they will announce something? Transmeta seems to be the ultimate silicon valley hype machine... Wish i could work in their marketing department...:)
I still want integratted spell checking... Or just a system wide dictionary, that's always in the same place, so Apps always know it's there. I hate writing something in one program, and having it be okay, then bring it to another program and see it fail on many words that are either not in the default dictionary or my auxillary dictionary.
For a while I wondered the same thing. But then look at Apple's QuickTime. Originally it was a piece of system software, but now it's been ported to Windows as more of an application rather than a set of extensions. Since most apps written for Macs make use of QuickTime, they all benefit from upgrades to it, as it is indeed integrated with the OS (as a set of extensions). One Windows, very few programs use Quicktime, aside from graphic apps. QuickTime is more of a utilitiy on Win32, enabling the playback of various types of media.
The same could be argued with Microsoft and IE. On Windows, IE is indeed well integrated with the rest of the OS. But microsoft also provides a lot of IE's functionality to other OSes, which is also called Internet Explorer.
I'm not defending them or their motives for doing what they did. I'm just giving an example of how an integrated part of the OS can still be available for other platforms. If you dig a centimeter deeper, you'll find that (in my opinion) Microsoft did what it did not for customer benefit as they always say, but as a weapon to destroy netscape with.
The finding of fact was what the Judge (thomas pennfield) decided were facts relevant to the case. That can't be rebuted, you're right. But what both the DOJ and Microsoft did was release their interpretations of the finding of fact. The DOJ obviously would point to a number of examples that they felt showed Microsoft had monopoly power and abused it, while Microsoft is obviously trying to point out area's where it feels show that it does not have monopoly power and competed fairly.
I'm fairly certain that this was a required event, and not just Microsoft posturing, in order to move the case along. At this point, I'm sure that the DOJ want's to get everything overwith, as does Microsoft, because obviously Microsoft's been slammed thus far, and they're going to appeal, possibly straight to the supreme court.
I just hope that this whole case is finished before election time comes.... It'll be a sad day if Microsoft gets off completely because the powers change and remove Reno, Klein, etc.
The new regs appeared very firmly against allowing the export of binaries which allowed for greater than certain key lengths.
Reading the Mozilla FAQ, it makes it clear that there are still a number of issues - they can't post the source due because foreigners can get at it that way, and they can't post the source because Americans can't have it either, because of the RSA patent issue.
Where did you learn this? According to the press release, this was enabled by the eased export regulations, which still clearly limit the strength cryptographic software for export (they upped symetric encryption to 64 bits, and assyemetric to 1024 bits and eliptic curves to 112 bits).
Further, according to the FAQ, you will not be able to download the actually code, because of RSA's patent. Therefore, only boxed copies purchased from Sun or whoever will include this functionality. And it seems that the actual mechanism that does the crypto will still remain quite closed (but it will be revisited on 9/20/2000 when RSA's patent expires.
So no, i don't think I'm at all wrong.
Re:Don't blame open source for browser stagnancy
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 2
I agree with you whole-heartedly. Microsoft is bad... But then the question goes, who's going to the innovating in an opensource market place? Microsoft and Netscape competed fiercely when there was money on the table. As soon as Microsoft took that away from them, Netscape, the company, as well as their flagship product, took a nose dive... And despite opensourcing their browser, Mozilla's made little advancement so far as regular users are concerned. Their only choice, if they want to use the most up to date browser on Windows is to use IE5, despite the Mozilla source being opened for nearly two years now....
What happens when StarOffice attains feature parity with MS Office? Which one of the 10,000 developers is going to lead the way, or are they just going to add features whereever they see fit, but with no continuity or direction?
I still remain in favor of proprietary software in so far as innovations and advancements are concerned. Open source wins on terms of price and probably quality, but not in bringing new technologies to the wider audiences.
Thanks to the improved export regulations, US based open source products can now incorporate the same "easily" crackable crypto that for export versions of commercial software do! Though I guess something is better than nothing.
Hopefully what this will do, is leave hooks in the code, so people can implement stronger crypto, if they have the tools and desire.
What are you talking about?!? Be(BEOS) IPOed this summer at $6 or so a share. It hadn't moved a much, started drifting downwards, and then skyrocketed.... Now it's drifting back down towards earth.
Re:Don't blame open source for browser stagnancy
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 2
Why is Microsoft to blame? Because their competitors couldn't afford to compete once they lost their revenue stream because of the free "integrated" browser? Isn't that what will happen to OS companies, or really any company, that either lets their technology be open sourced, or sees a workable opensource clone spring up from the community? It is.
People always say that if you build a superior product, people will still pay for it. I don't see that. When given a choice of a fully functional product for $500 (let alone $50,000) dollars, many people will first try a free alternative that offers only 80% of the functionality, just to see if they can work around it's short-comings...
Time will tell... If open source stays with us, in the main stream, we may succeed in having free software, but at a tremendous cost in terms of what software is actually available.
Slashdot Mirror
Intels spat is that they licensed their patented technology to VIA. VIA made changes that Intel disputed, so apparently, Intel has terminated their license, which means that VIA no longer has a legal right to use Intels patents.
With the license terminated, Via has nothing to sell to another company, because that company would then be violating Intels patents and could therefore not ship into the US, unless something gets overturned.
This is the same reason that US based PKI products use either Diffie Hellman or aquire a license from RSA. They can't just use an RSA implementation that was developed overseas and sell it here, because that would still violate RSA's original patent.
Expect to see a HUGE battle over this one. Via definetly is the ballsiest company to cross Intel's path in ages.
The last two yars Intel did all it could to avoid being marked a "monopoly", including licensing MMX and the P6 bus. Now that it's not called that, it can continue to compete "aggressively", which according to Intels playbook, includes revoking licenses it granted when it was under the DOJ's microscope.
This complaint is all about the P6 bus. AMD is exempt from all this whining. They signed away their ability to be slot compatible with Intel for a license to MMX. The only way that this could ever affect AMD is if they turned around and made Slot 1 Athlons.
Which would seem to make it "Slashdot Gripes About Patents Day"! :)
Come on, guys... Three in a row? Surely you've got some other stories in need of posting.
For the most part, I think that people should stand up and be counted. But there comes a time when, on occasion, people choose, for whatever reason, that they do not want themselves associated with their words. Authors have pen names, for instance.
There are a lot of stories that cite annonymous sources in publications such as Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times that would have never seen the light of day if the correspondents were forced to reveal themselves.
Yes, AC's around here seem to be usually obnoxious, but obviously you've never made a comment around here that you thought was an insiteful bit and woke up the next day to find your mailbox stuffed with 50 messages all calling you a dipshit, or what not.
Freedom is a responsibility. I hope that we can be responsible enough that our right or ability to speak anonymously, without fear of retribution, is never taken away.
I hope no one comes along today and starts complaining about patents in this thread. Yes, some patents appear to be bogus (one-click shopping springs to mind) but this is a well deserved patent, in my eyes. After all, if cloning were a simple feat that didn't require years of research and millions of dollars in funding, then we'd have seen cloned sheep years ago, and cloned dinosaurs would be much closer to reality than they are today (which is pretty distant).
How do you propose that this would even be possible? One the internet, anybody can be anybody. Filthy old men can be 21 year old girls, FBI agents can be 6 year olds, and I can be a celebrity. Do you propose a lengthy interview process in order to get a slashdot account? Or rather than having a moderation threshhold, would you set your browser to ignore posts from people under the age of XX?
Of course, all the honest people will say exactly what they are, but all the people that know that they don't know jack will just be able to say that they're 35 year old Sys admins, 45 yr old DBA's, etc....
Next, you'll want posting of IP's or subnets... Make it easier to ignore people from AOL. Of course, that removes the ability to post annonymously, which is what freedom of speech is all about.
(That blurb came from a 24 year old consultant)
yes. I forgot the chip numbers, so you'll have to excuse me, but:
The 68000 could not use an MMU or FPU
The 68020 could use an external MMU and FPU
The 68030 had an integrated MMU and could use and external FPU
The 68040 integrated both, with the exception of
The 68LC040 had no FPU but a working MMU.
Back then amiga's were around, which could take advantage of MMU's, but I think most people saw them in Apple's machines. Their first ones were called 32-bit dirt, meaning that there were errors in the ROMs that didn't permit them to use 32 bit addressing, until (it think) connectix released Mode32. The result of that was the system SAW the memory above 8 MB, but wouldn't let you use it. It would just report all the extra memory as being allocated to the system.
They got their $100 million from people such as Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures among others. None of those financiers are going to invest that much money unless the business plan includes mention of the company going public. If he'd used any other words besides "rounds of financing" then i may have doubted it, but that's CEO speak for raising money prior to the IPO.
And yes, they won't have fabs. Is that good? That means that rather then themselves having to come up with the money to buy the fab (a material asset) they need to use that money instead to pay IBM (cost of sales). In the short term, it leaves them with more money in their pockets, but in the long term it means that there's an added expense that will get passed on (even though the price range is only 60-90 dollars.)
No offense to you or anything, but how in the world was that "interesting"?
The Crusoe does nothing for making the switch from Windows to Linux easier. Nada. Same for BSD, Be, etc... It does just as much as did the Athlon, except Crusoes effectively a version 1.0 product coming from a brand new company, as opposed to Athlong which is a much more matured product that merges the best of two already mature companies products.
Java shouldn't even be included in that discussion, unless a JVM is ported to run directly on top of Crusoe.
And of course any journalist worth their salt HAS to ask about IPO's. With Amazon's, Ebays, Redhats, VA Linuxs, etc, it's the simple truth that Transmeta will in all likely hood go public (they talked about who supplied their first round and second round of financing. The next logical step is to go public). That, plus the hype they've drawn to them selves, and the market they've painted for their processor.
Well, what about a Mixed mode solution, akin the the MacOS? Programs could run in translated mode at regular speed, and portions of them could be translated to the full VLIW instruction set. It semems that Crusoe is already dynamically recompiling x86 to it's own instruction set, so, with smarter compiliers coming (which intel is funding), wouldn't it only add to the performance?
After all, if intel's tools are indeed open-source, then it shouldn't be hard to add support for other VLIW instruction sets to the compiler. Of course, that would all hinge on Transmeta releasing the instruction set...
Nasdaq owns the ticker symbols. They aren't licensed to companies. And they can move them around as they see fit.
I think, but i'm not sure, that tickers can be 5 or 6 letters long... But maybe it's not nasdaq, but rather on the OTC bulletin boards.
I definetly think that no matter how much people slam LinuxOne, VA Linux definetly pulled the sleezier tactic by asking for LNUX. I have seen SO MANY articles about the Linux operating system that have hyperlinks cross-referenceing themselves to VA Linux.
Yes, it sounds like a kick ass product... I listened to the conference until my connection konked out around 1:05. But I was still hoping for more.
According to all the rumors I'd heard, this chip would be able to load many different instruction sets (PowerPC, SPARC, etc...) and always pretty much be running in a native mode.
Of all the complaints I've heard about x86 processors across the years, the one that sticks out the most is that they're a pain to develop for. This new chip does nothing to alleviate that.
In a way, transmeta's become like Be. Be originally set out to take over the world (or at least, the Mac OS market place), moved onto x86 and realized that can't beat Microsoft out of the market place, so they might as well try to co-habitate as well as they can. Transmeta has a really cool product, but has also realized that they can't really push intel out of the market place, so they might as well just aim for intel compatibility...
Too bad it sounds like they expect nothing to be written in Crusoe's native language... There must be some speed improvement that could be gained, if say, Crusoe's achieved 40% market share in the notebook market, that would make it worthwhile for developers to create Crusoe ports.
A company does not need to trademark their name in order to go public. Where did you think up that little rule? What you could do is go trademark LinuxOne for yourself, but guess what? LinuxOne could sue you and take the trademark from you, because they can obviously show prior use.
Come one guys. You don't like Linux One. They seem a little bit shady. So don't support them. But don't actively go trying to destroy the company. That's just immature, and with all the speculation that gets posted here, could almost be considered libelous.
Everyone deserves a fair shot. You may not agree with them. You may not like them. Blah blah blah. The bottom line is that maybe they will make good on their goals of becoming a real Linux company.
I couldn't see it, so i listened in on ZD Radio, but now it's 1 and Real Player says there's a problem with Net conjestion.... Thanks guys.
Anyways. Have they actually built any, or is all their information based on software simulations? Granted, the simulations can be pretty accurate, but then Intel thought that Merced was going to perform a lot better than it did when it reached silicon.
Listening to them describe videotaped presentations, though, doesn't sound very exciting. I wish they had a Crusoe motherboard/chip vs. P3, so it would be more first hand... After all - Microsoft has taught us not to trust video tapes any more....
So now they've finally announced confirmation that today is indeed the day they will announce something? Transmeta seems to be the ultimate silicon valley hype machine... Wish i could work in their marketing department... :)
I still want integratted spell checking... Or just a system wide dictionary, that's always in the same place, so Apps always know it's there. I hate writing something in one program, and having it be okay, then bring it to another program and see it fail on many words that are either not in the default dictionary or my auxillary dictionary.
Wishful thinking, I suppose.
For a while I wondered the same thing. But then look at Apple's QuickTime. Originally it was a piece of system software, but now it's been ported to Windows as more of an application rather than a set of extensions. Since most apps written for Macs make use of QuickTime, they all benefit from upgrades to it, as it is indeed integrated with the OS (as a set of extensions). One Windows, very few programs use Quicktime, aside from graphic apps. QuickTime is more of a utilitiy on Win32, enabling the playback of various types of media.
The same could be argued with Microsoft and IE. On Windows, IE is indeed well integrated with the rest of the OS. But microsoft also provides a lot of IE's functionality to other OSes, which is also called Internet Explorer.
I'm not defending them or their motives for doing what they did. I'm just giving an example of how an integrated part of the OS can still be available for other platforms. If you dig a centimeter deeper, you'll find that (in my opinion) Microsoft did what it did not for customer benefit as they always say, but as a weapon to destroy netscape with.
The finding of fact was what the Judge (thomas pennfield) decided were facts relevant to the case. That can't be rebuted, you're right. But what both the DOJ and Microsoft did was release their interpretations of the finding of fact. The DOJ obviously would point to a number of examples that they felt showed Microsoft had monopoly power and abused it, while Microsoft is obviously trying to point out area's where it feels show that it does not have monopoly power and competed fairly.
I'm fairly certain that this was a required event, and not just Microsoft posturing, in order to move the case along. At this point, I'm sure that the DOJ want's to get everything overwith, as does Microsoft, because obviously Microsoft's been slammed thus far, and they're going to appeal, possibly straight to the supreme court.
I just hope that this whole case is finished before election time comes.... It'll be a sad day if Microsoft gets off completely because the powers change and remove Reno, Klein, etc.
The new regs appeared very firmly against allowing the export of binaries which allowed for greater than certain key lengths.
Reading the Mozilla FAQ, it makes it clear that there are still a number of issues - they can't post the source due because foreigners can get at it that way, and they can't post the source because Americans can't have it either, because of the RSA patent issue.
Where did you learn this? According to the press release, this was enabled by the eased export regulations, which still clearly limit the strength cryptographic software for export (they upped symetric encryption to 64 bits, and assyemetric to 1024 bits and eliptic curves to 112 bits).
Further, according to the FAQ, you will not be able to download the actually code, because of RSA's patent. Therefore, only boxed copies purchased from Sun or whoever will include this functionality. And it seems that the actual mechanism that does the crypto will still remain quite closed (but it will be revisited on 9/20/2000 when RSA's patent expires.
So no, i don't think I'm at all wrong.
I agree with you whole-heartedly. Microsoft is bad... But then the question goes, who's going to the innovating in an opensource market place? Microsoft and Netscape competed fiercely when there was money on the table. As soon as Microsoft took that away from them, Netscape, the company, as well as their flagship product, took a nose dive... And despite opensourcing their browser, Mozilla's made little advancement so far as regular users are concerned. Their only choice, if they want to use the most up to date browser on Windows is to use IE5, despite the Mozilla source being opened for nearly two years now....
What happens when StarOffice attains feature parity with MS Office? Which one of the 10,000 developers is going to lead the way, or are they just going to add features whereever they see fit, but with no continuity or direction?
I still remain in favor of proprietary software in so far as innovations and advancements are concerned. Open source wins on terms of price and probably quality, but not in bringing new technologies to the wider audiences.
Thanks to the improved export regulations, US based open source products can now incorporate the same "easily" crackable crypto that for export versions of commercial software do! Though I guess something is better than nothing.
Hopefully what this will do, is leave hooks in the code, so people can implement stronger crypto, if they have the tools and desire.
What are you talking about?!? Be(BEOS) IPOed this summer at $6 or so a share. It hadn't moved a much, started drifting downwards, and then skyrocketed.... Now it's drifting back down towards earth.
Go look
Why is Microsoft to blame? Because their competitors couldn't afford to compete once they lost their revenue stream because of the free "integrated" browser? Isn't that what will happen to OS companies, or really any company, that either lets their technology be open sourced, or sees a workable opensource clone spring up from the community? It is.
People always say that if you build a superior product, people will still pay for it. I don't see that. When given a choice of a fully functional product for $500 (let alone $50,000) dollars, many people will first try a free alternative that offers only 80% of the functionality, just to see if they can work around it's short-comings...
Time will tell... If open source stays with us, in the main stream, we may succeed in having free software, but at a tremendous cost in terms of what software is actually available.