Hey, before that vein in your forehead bursts, chill the **** out!
NT is competition for linux... or rather vice versa. When Linux surpasses NT marketshare, then it'll be the other way... And plenty of companies run only Microsoft software, so obviously the requirement for a GUI isn't that hard on them...
And so far as applications go... I was talking in reference to CONSUMER USE... And in general, the Mac market. No imaging professional is going to drop Photoshop for the GIMP, sorry! And no matter how good you think Star Office may be, people will DEMAND microsoft applications for some time to come... And AOL... well, that happens to be the worlds largest ISP... People like AOL... You're right... I do have an AOL account i can't seem to get rid of, but it's been long since relegated to email...
And sorry, most imaging is not done on Unix... It's done on Mac's... Unix gets the high-end of 3D and Film production, with NT taking the mid-range of 3D and creeping into the film and video world due to the microsoft investment in Avid... But just about every poster you see, magazine you read, they're all done with Macs...
But mostly, I don't see Mac OS X going after much of Linux's market as a whole... Maybe LinuxPPC, but not really, because OS-X Consumer is just that - a consumer OS. And Linux is nowhere near them in that market. VA Linux even said so.
I'd say that disks are the biggest bottleneck today, just because memory is still too expensive to be able to fit all your apps and data in RAM. Not that you need to, but everytime the disk light lights up, that's what's eating up your time...
And as for "intellegent" devices... SCSI... it's here... it's been here forever... it's just most people are too much into cost and not into quality. Yep they cost more, but they're generally faster (because they represent the high-end of disk drives) and better constructed (again, better margins means they can spend more on parts to build them). And with me, copying files from one disk to the other has yet to cause my CPU usage to rise more than 4%...
Apple would be unwise to mention Unix in relation to it's consumer OS... Otherwise, I'm sture we'd see Microsoft pointing out this very fact: "Look, the Macintosh Operating System is based on Unix - that 25 year old operating system, that require you to edit text files from the command line in order to do anything at all with it..."
No. Just let them ship the OS with all the buzzwords people are looking for. If someone is so interested, they will easily find out the underpinnings of their machine. But don't intimidate them from buying one in the first place.
Okay.. I just made a Photoshop TIFF file. 4 channels. 128 by 128 pixels. The size, uncompressed, is 70,541 bytes. That's a far cry from 1/2 a meg, don't you think? And that's a TIFF, with quite a bit of extra garbage along for the ride. Don't agree? I'd email it to you, if you'd like...
It's not like it stores each program and documents icon.... The Application has a set of Icons inside it. When it's installed, the icons are referenced in the desktop DB. Each file has a creator and type code, which references the correct icon.... It really won't add up to much real quick or anything... Besides. In the day and age 300, 400, and beyond MHz processors, 12 GB hard drives and 64 MB being the minimum amount of shipping RAM in most machines, what's the worry? It's not like it took us 15 years of Moores law to finally get machines with enough horsepower to handle larger icons.... there's just a lot of idle CPU time that may as well be used for something constructive.
Ummm. Can I laugh? Linux's first real competition??? What about Windows, *BSD, Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, AIX, BeOS, etc??? I'd say Linux was Windows NT's first real competition... But Linux is also leaps and bounds away from competing with Apple/Mac OS-X.
They have completely different markets, and anyone that says that Linux can take on Apple at the desktop is living in a different universe... KDE and GNOME are still awefully far out from the Mac's interface, instead emulating Windows which in turn attempts to lift the best from the Mac and X and really just missing the whole point of both.
And further, dare I say the "A" word? Applications? No MS Office. No AOL. No Adobe Apps (aside from distiller, reader, and possibly framemaker). The list goes on.
No, Mac OS-X is NOT Linux's first real competition. If it were, Linux would be dead in the water right now... Apples a desktop company. Linux is basically doing what NT did... Starting on the server and migrating towards the desktop. And it's still got leaps and bounds to go, sorrry.
Ummm small tidbit, but maybe go check around the web or buy a book (MkLinux... whatever the whole name is...) and find out what Mach is.
One thing for sure is that it's in no way based on BSD... Mach's a microkernel... it manages the hardware... BSD runs on top of it. And the beauty of Mach is that you would theoretically be able to run other OSes/environments on it simultaneously...
I'd go on, but then you'd find i don't know much more beyond that... but go look for yourself somehwere.... Carnegie-Mellon would be a good place to start.
So long as they had other closed API's (such as display, etc...) MSFT would have no issues with that, i don't think. Office doesn't seem to spend much of it's time making low-level system calls, to my knowledge. But then how would i know?
You'd most likely need to recompile apps, unless someone writes up a PowerPC emulator... but then what the hells the point of that? You're talking huge slowdown, there. Going the otherway isn't so bad, i don't think - emulating x86 on PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, or any other risc... but the reverse would just be nutty...
Not to say that Quicktime is shoddy or anything (it's not! especially on the Mac, it's very transparent... install a new version and all of a sudden your apps have features they didn't have before),
But Apple has a vested interest in making sure that Quicktime works best on their platform... Because if QuickTime or an equivilant appeared for Windows or Linux, (and no... AVI's and DirectX don't quite fit the bill) then Apple would indeed be in trouble, as far as the high-end (content creation) part of their market is concerned.
What are you talking about? OS-X Consumer will automatically hit 100% market share on all shipping macs within a year of it's intro. What more do they need? Oh you mean OS-X for x86? One word... not a chance in hell of that happening.
Though i'd love to see it myself, 1/2 of what makes the mac a mac is the fact that it just works. You don't need to care about IRQ's or anything like that. Only the rarest of cards have ever had any requirement other than plug it in, insert floppy, run installer, reboot...
The PC is a commodity platform... everything about it is 2nd rate compared to Macs, Sun boxes, SGI's, etc.... The performance is WORSE, until you get to dual CPU machines, which Apple will be remedying soon.
And lastly, there's just not that much money for anyone but microsoft to make selling OSes for x86... Be charges what? $50?.... Apple would be much better served by striving to cut the iMacs price point even further. A lot of home users would rather get a new machine rather than deal with the percieved struggles of repartitioning and installing a brand new OS....
Up until KDE and Gnome arrived, X seemed to me seriously dated... now they're here, but the MacOS has 15 years of usability testing behind it...
and besides that, how dare you call the Mac's interface old, when Linux supporters always point out that because linux has a unix heritage, it has 15 or 20 years of lessons learned behind it...
Same thing applies to the mac interface, and even more so, because at least 10x more people have used macs in their lives than have used unix...
#1 - 2nd Video card (for two monitors) #2 - Video Capture Card #3 - Better Sound Card #4 - SCSI card
With 10/100 ethernet onboard, the need for slot 5 has been alleviated. There used to be a day when people would plop two Apple Quickdraw 3D cards into a 9500, but video cards have eliminated that need. But some people still like a 3rd monitor (one for editing, one for previewing, and one for other apps... Or else, one for sound tracks, one for laying out, and one for video...
And yet others seem to like 2 SCSI cards.... With the possibility of two or three live video sources, just now with that 160 MB/Sec variant of SCSI has it been possible to shove all that data down on SCSI channel.
And there's more possibilities, too... but i don't want to ramble for too long about this
Nasdaq owns the stock symbols and just issues them to companies as they're needed. COKE is already used by, suprise, Coca-Cola.... There's no reason why Linux One shouldn't be allowed to be LINX, if VA Linux can be LNUX. It's a complete double standard to say that Linux One can't have a symbol that's close to Linux, when VA linux be LNUX as opposed to, say VALX, which appears to be available.
You can't just selectively apply standards based on whether you like a company or not... but regardless, no one can really intercede, unless a company confronts Nasdaq and wants that ticker and has a strong case for having it, say Linx, Inc, or something like that....
Wouldn't it be possible to make a VM that boots the new kernel, then copies itself into the older kernels memory space? That way, supposing everything went smoothly, no reboot would be needed? Just curious if that's a possibility or not? it'd have to be handled in the kernel, so as to allow itself to be overwritten... Memory protection seems like it would be a hassel for anything but SW inside the kernel to accomplish that.
Whatever you say... It's just against the whole GPL, is all... To mandate anything beyond returning the code to the community. And rob says it's near the GPL with that one exception, and if you don't agree, send him money... that's not GPL. And nor is the untimeliness of his updates...
and not all kernel contributors get their due credit. and there's no clause saying if i host a site using linux, that i have to mention the fact, or anything... i think if you beleive what you're saying, you're letting rob set a double standard for himself.
SO many people here whine when a company opens it's source but creates a new almost opensource license... Corel linux is GPLed, but that didn't stop people from saying they were violating it when they didn't release the source to their beta immediately and for everyone.
I can give example after example about this, if you desire... Consider Rob payed for his time on slash... in case you didn't notice he's worth at least a few million dollars now... and if that's not enough for him, well, he shouldn't have even mentioned the GPL in his licensing page... Because it's no where near it.
It seems strange that the "voice of the open-source community", as Andover has been built up to be in the rest of the media, can't get it's act together and release the source to slashdot on a timely basis. How hard can it be to copy a few Perl scripts into a directory, and export some empty tables from MySQL? Other people could attempt to document it, if you guys are too busy to deal with that.
Also, in as far as licenses go, it seems that Slashdot has it's own opensource license. It's based on the GPL, but requires you to use the slashdot logo if you actually use the code on a site, with the alternative of paying money.... That seems to fly in the face of the GPL and Opensource.
(It's funny... i was driving to work this morning and these issues popped into my mind for the last 30 minutes of the drive... show's a little about how interesting my life is, huh?:)
So anyways... put your money where your mouth is and provide us with slashes source on a timely basis and under the GPL, not the Slashdot Pseudo Public License.
I might be jumping to conclusions here, but... The only point to data being digital is that it doesn't lose quality as it's being copied. Therefore, you'd really not want to put a VHS tape on to a CD, if you could help it. Which would mean that the real market for such a format - (Motion JPEG2000) - would be for transfering video from DVD to CD. That fucking sucks...
Yeah, DeCSS needed to be created so that Linux users could watch movies, but now witness the rush to create a method which enables people who don't own DVD players or DVD discs to be able to watch DVD on their CD drives. And everyone here said the all that DeCSS was solely to enable the viewing of movies on Linux.
I'm only ranting like the because that seems to be obviously what Roblimo or Polo meant when they mentioned the fitting of a movie onto a CD. Seems no one here respects IP anymore... Yet they don't criticize themselves, or their forum. Just others. For instance why isn't slash GPLed? Because IP is real, and there is value to it... Just as the movie industry puts up huge amounts of cash in hopes that they can convince the customer to see a movie, Rob had been donating his time until the IPO to make this site as it was and knows that if anyone could use his SW, he'd be at a competitive disadvantage... he'd essentially be doing R&D for potential competitors...
If anyone even dares to about it that way, let me know... all it shows is what platforms are popular among supporters of distributed.net.
If it showed anything else according to the real world, you'd see Windows machines dwarfing all others, for the simple fact that there's huge numbrs of them.... Macs would come in second, with linux having just made a huge run up to the #3 spot...
That's not what it shows, though... So I don't think that anything beyond platform popularity of distibuted's audience can be statistcally relevant.
I think that the RC-64 project has shown that even 64 bit encryption is inadequate. The idea that a bunch of basically personal computers, workstations, and servers could put that big a dent in the keyspace in two years is not very reassuring, considering that organizations that may attempt to break it for gain are not going to be using the same machines as we've got.
They'll be using machines built for the singular purpose of cracking keys, rather than clumsy computers, that sometimes have 100% of their CPU available to the cracking effort, but at other times may disappear for days on end. And most importantly, each cracker will be multitudes of times faster, being that everything is in silicon, rather than being processed on (mostly) x86 processors...
But, tell me this, besides exportable browsers and other software, what applications are using 128 bits these days? Not my bank, brokerage, etc.
They could have emailed an offer to buy their CDs to every Napster user that downloads their music.
Except Napster wasn't created with the desire to actually help marketing efforts. It's only purpose is to allow for distribution of music. You don't need a real email address, let alone to supply a physical address so that bands can reach you. And they apparently don't have the infrastructure in place to track files. It's probably intentional, so that bands can't actually request a file no be allowed to be shared over their network, but at the same time, if they can't do that, they can't supply to Metallica or anyone else for that matter, a list of people who are interested in their music.
What's the point? they may as well go for a netzero account. How're you going to sustain any reasonable level of serice on $5 a month? You still need to pay for enough lines that your users don't run into nonstop busy signals and such
I thought BSD requires you to leave copyrights in place... So, it's still your software, you're just letting everyone do whatever they want to do with it, without regard for you. If they want to re-release their code back to you, that's nice of them.
And as it's been said all over... how has the GPL protected anyone from Redhat, VA Linux, Cobalt, or any others from profiting from YOUR work? Only if you were in a visible position were you offered any stock. That sounds fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, before that vein in your forehead bursts, chill the **** out!
NT is competition for linux... or rather vice versa. When Linux surpasses NT marketshare, then it'll be the other way... And plenty of companies run only Microsoft software, so obviously the requirement for a GUI isn't that hard on them...
And so far as applications go... I was talking in reference to CONSUMER USE... And in general, the Mac market. No imaging professional is going to drop Photoshop for the GIMP, sorry! And no matter how good you think Star Office may be, people will DEMAND microsoft applications for some time to come... And AOL... well, that happens to be the worlds largest ISP... People like AOL... You're right... I do have an AOL account i can't seem to get rid of, but it's been long since relegated to email...
And sorry, most imaging is not done on Unix... It's done on Mac's... Unix gets the high-end of 3D and Film production, with NT taking the mid-range of 3D and creeping into the film and video world due to the microsoft investment in Avid... But just about every poster you see, magazine you read, they're all done with Macs...
But mostly, I don't see Mac OS X going after much of Linux's market as a whole... Maybe LinuxPPC, but not really, because OS-X Consumer is just that - a consumer OS. And Linux is nowhere near them in that market. VA Linux even said so.
I'd say that disks are the biggest bottleneck today, just because memory is still too expensive to be able to fit all your apps and data in RAM. Not that you need to, but everytime the disk light lights up, that's what's eating up your time...
And as for "intellegent" devices... SCSI... it's here... it's been here forever... it's just most people are too much into cost and not into quality. Yep they cost more, but they're generally faster (because they represent the high-end of disk drives) and better constructed (again, better margins means they can spend more on parts to build them). And with me, copying files from one disk to the other has yet to cause my CPU usage to rise more than 4%...
Apple would be unwise to mention Unix in relation to it's consumer OS... Otherwise, I'm sture we'd see Microsoft pointing out this very fact: "Look, the Macintosh Operating System is based on Unix - that 25 year old operating system, that require you to edit text files from the command line in order to do anything at all with it..."
No. Just let them ship the OS with all the buzzwords people are looking for. If someone is so interested, they will easily find out the underpinnings of their machine. But don't intimidate them from buying one in the first place.
Okay.. I just made a Photoshop TIFF file. 4 channels. 128 by 128 pixels. The size, uncompressed, is 70,541 bytes. That's a far cry from 1/2 a meg, don't you think? And that's a TIFF, with quite a bit of extra garbage along for the ride. Don't agree? I'd email it to you, if you'd like...
It's not like it stores each program and documents icon.... The Application has a set of Icons inside it. When it's installed, the icons are referenced in the desktop DB. Each file has a creator and type code, which references the correct icon.... It really won't add up to much real quick or anything... Besides. In the day and age 300, 400, and beyond MHz processors, 12 GB hard drives and 64 MB being the minimum amount of shipping RAM in most machines, what's the worry? It's not like it took us 15 years of Moores law to finally get machines with enough horsepower to handle larger icons.... there's just a lot of idle CPU time that may as well be used for something constructive.
Ummm. Can I laugh? Linux's first real competition??? What about Windows, *BSD, Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, AIX, BeOS, etc??? I'd say Linux was Windows NT's first real competition... But Linux is also leaps and bounds away from competing with Apple/Mac OS-X.
They have completely different markets, and anyone that says that Linux can take on Apple at the desktop is living in a different universe... KDE and GNOME are still awefully far out from the Mac's interface, instead emulating Windows which in turn attempts to lift the best from the Mac and X and really just missing the whole point of both.
And further, dare I say the "A" word? Applications? No MS Office. No AOL. No Adobe Apps (aside from distiller, reader, and possibly framemaker). The list goes on.
No, Mac OS-X is NOT Linux's first real competition. If it were, Linux would be dead in the water right now... Apples a desktop company. Linux is basically doing what NT did... Starting on the server and migrating towards the desktop. And it's still got leaps and bounds to go, sorrry.
Ummm small tidbit, but maybe go check around the web or buy a book (MkLinux... whatever the whole name is...) and find out what Mach is.
One thing for sure is that it's in no way based on BSD... Mach's a microkernel... it manages the hardware... BSD runs on top of it. And the beauty of Mach is that you would theoretically be able to run other OSes/environments on it simultaneously...
I'd go on, but then you'd find i don't know much more beyond that... but go look for yourself somehwere.... Carnegie-Mellon would be a good place to start.
So long as they had other closed API's (such as display, etc...) MSFT would have no issues with that, i don't think. Office doesn't seem to spend much of it's time making low-level system calls, to my knowledge. But then how would i know?
You'd most likely need to recompile apps, unless someone writes up a PowerPC emulator... but then what the hells the point of that? You're talking huge slowdown, there. Going the otherway isn't so bad, i don't think - emulating x86 on PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, or any other risc... but the reverse would just be nutty...
Not to say that Quicktime is shoddy or anything (it's not! especially on the Mac, it's very transparent... install a new version and all of a sudden your apps have features they didn't have before),
But Apple has a vested interest in making sure that Quicktime works best on their platform... Because if QuickTime or an equivilant appeared for Windows or Linux, (and no... AVI's and DirectX don't quite fit the bill) then Apple would indeed be in trouble, as far as the high-end (content creation) part of their market is concerned.
What are you talking about? OS-X Consumer will automatically hit 100% market share on all shipping macs within a year of it's intro. What more do they need? Oh you mean OS-X for x86? One word... not a chance in hell of that happening.
.... Apple would be much better served by striving to cut the iMacs price point even further. A lot of home users would rather get a new machine rather than deal with the percieved struggles of repartitioning and installing a brand new OS....
Though i'd love to see it myself, 1/2 of what makes the mac a mac is the fact that it just works. You don't need to care about IRQ's or anything like that. Only the rarest of cards have ever had any requirement other than plug it in, insert floppy, run installer, reboot...
The PC is a commodity platform... everything about it is 2nd rate compared to Macs, Sun boxes, SGI's, etc.... The performance is WORSE, until you get to dual CPU machines, which Apple will be remedying soon.
And lastly, there's just not that much money for anyone but microsoft to make selling OSes for x86... Be charges what? $50?
Shall i continue?
:)
Up until KDE and Gnome arrived, X seemed to me seriously dated... now they're here, but the MacOS has 15 years of usability testing behind it...
and besides that, how dare you call the Mac's interface old, when Linux supporters always point out that because linux has a unix heritage, it has 15 or 20 years of lessons learned behind it...
Same thing applies to the mac interface, and even more so, because at least 10x more people have used macs in their lives than have used unix...
#1 - 2nd Video card (for two monitors)
#2 - Video Capture Card
#3 - Better Sound Card
#4 - SCSI card
With 10/100 ethernet onboard, the need for slot 5 has been alleviated. There used to be a day when people would plop two Apple Quickdraw 3D cards into a 9500, but video cards have eliminated that need. But some people still like a 3rd monitor (one for editing, one for previewing, and one for other apps... Or else, one for sound tracks, one for laying out, and one for video...
And yet others seem to like 2 SCSI cards.... With the possibility of two or three live video sources, just now with that 160 MB/Sec variant of SCSI has it been possible to shove all that data down on SCSI channel.
And there's more possibilities, too... but i don't want to ramble for too long about this
Nasdaq owns the stock symbols and just issues them to companies as they're needed. COKE is already used by, suprise, Coca-Cola.... There's no reason why Linux One shouldn't be allowed to be LINX, if VA Linux can be LNUX. It's a complete double standard to say that Linux One can't have a symbol that's close to Linux, when VA linux be LNUX as opposed to, say VALX, which appears to be available.
You can't just selectively apply standards based on whether you like a company or not... but regardless, no one can really intercede, unless a company confronts Nasdaq and wants that ticker and has a strong case for having it, say Linx, Inc, or something like that....
Wouldn't it be possible to make a VM that boots the new kernel, then copies itself into the older kernels memory space? That way, supposing everything went smoothly, no reboot would be needed? Just curious if that's a possibility or not? it'd have to be handled in the kernel, so as to allow itself to be overwritten... Memory protection seems like it would be a hassel for anything but SW inside the kernel to accomplish that.
Whatever you say... It's just against the whole GPL, is all... To mandate anything beyond returning the code to the community. And rob says it's near the GPL with that one exception, and if you don't agree, send him money... that's not GPL. And nor is the untimeliness of his updates...
and not all kernel contributors get their due credit. and there's no clause saying if i host a site using linux, that i have to mention the fact, or anything... i think if you beleive what you're saying, you're letting rob set a double standard for himself.
SO many people here whine when a company opens it's source but creates a new almost opensource license... Corel linux is GPLed, but that didn't stop people from saying they were violating it when they didn't release the source to their beta immediately and for everyone.
I can give example after example about this, if you desire... Consider Rob payed for his time on slash... in case you didn't notice he's worth at least a few million dollars now... and if that's not enough for him, well, he shouldn't have even mentioned the GPL in his licensing page... Because it's no where near it.
I agree full-heartedly with #1 of above.
:)
It seems strange that the "voice of the open-source community", as Andover has been built up to be in the rest of the media, can't get it's act together and release the source to slashdot on a timely basis. How hard can it be to copy a few Perl scripts into a directory, and export some empty tables from MySQL? Other people could attempt to document it, if you guys are too busy to deal with that.
Also, in as far as licenses go, it seems that Slashdot has it's own opensource license. It's based on the GPL, but requires you to use the slashdot logo if you actually use the code on a site, with the alternative of paying money.... That seems to fly in the face of the GPL and Opensource.
(It's funny... i was driving to work this morning and these issues popped into my mind for the last 30 minutes of the drive... show's a little about how interesting my life is, huh?
So anyways... put your money where your mouth is and provide us with slashes source on a timely basis and under the GPL, not the Slashdot Pseudo Public License.
Thanks.
I might be jumping to conclusions here, but... The only point to data being digital is that it doesn't lose quality as it's being copied. Therefore, you'd really not want to put a VHS tape on to a CD, if you could help it. Which would mean that the real market for such a format - (Motion JPEG2000) - would be for transfering video from DVD to CD. That fucking sucks...
Yeah, DeCSS needed to be created so that Linux users could watch movies, but now witness the rush to create a method which enables people who don't own DVD players or DVD discs to be able to watch DVD on their CD drives. And everyone here said the all that DeCSS was solely to enable the viewing of movies on Linux.
I'm only ranting like the because that seems to be obviously what Roblimo or Polo meant when they mentioned the fitting of a movie onto a CD. Seems no one here respects IP anymore... Yet they don't criticize themselves, or their forum. Just others. For instance why isn't slash GPLed? Because IP is real, and there is value to it... Just as the movie industry puts up huge amounts of cash in hopes that they can convince the customer to see a movie, Rob had been donating his time until the IPO to make this site as it was and knows that if anyone could use his SW, he'd be at a competitive disadvantage... he'd essentially be doing R&D for potential competitors...
Whoops... Didn't mean to go that overboard.
END OF RANT.
Guess that means that Windows is better than all other OSes combined, eh? :)
It's funny. Laugh. Just don't moderate it as funy, because it's not really thatfunny.
If anyone even dares to about it that way, let me know... all it shows is what platforms are popular among supporters of distributed.net.
If it showed anything else according to the real world, you'd see Windows machines dwarfing all others, for the simple fact that there's huge numbrs of them.... Macs would come in second, with linux having just made a huge run up to the #3 spot...
That's not what it shows, though... So I don't think that anything beyond platform popularity of distibuted's audience can be statistcally relevant.
Au contraire (is that how you spell it? :)
I think that the RC-64 project has shown that even 64 bit encryption is inadequate. The idea that a bunch of basically personal computers, workstations, and servers could put that big a dent in the keyspace in two years is not very reassuring, considering that organizations that may attempt to break it for gain are not going to be using the same machines as we've got.
They'll be using machines built for the singular purpose of cracking keys, rather than clumsy computers, that sometimes have 100% of their CPU available to the cracking effort, but at other times may disappear for days on end. And most importantly, each cracker will be multitudes of times faster, being that everything is in silicon, rather than being processed on (mostly) x86 processors...
But, tell me this, besides exportable browsers and other software, what applications are using 128 bits these days? Not my bank, brokerage, etc.
Um... BBS Spot of a spoof site. Nothing that you read there is real except that they're all original ideas thought up by the authors of the site.
They could have emailed an offer to buy their CDs to every Napster user that downloads their music.
Except Napster wasn't created with the desire to actually help marketing efforts. It's only purpose is to allow for distribution of music. You don't need a real email address, let alone to supply a physical address so that bands can reach you. And they apparently don't have the infrastructure in place to track files. It's probably intentional, so that bands can't actually request a file no be allowed to be shared over their network, but at the same time, if they can't do that, they can't supply to Metallica or anyone else for that matter, a list of people who are interested in their music.
What's the point? they may as well go for a netzero account. How're you going to sustain any reasonable level of serice on $5 a month? You still need to pay for enough lines that your users don't run into nonstop busy signals and such
I thought BSD requires you to leave copyrights in place... So, it's still your software, you're just letting everyone do whatever they want to do with it, without regard for you. If they want to re-release their code back to you, that's nice of them.
And as it's been said all over... how has the GPL protected anyone from Redhat, VA Linux, Cobalt, or any others from profiting from YOUR work? Only if you were in a visible position were you offered any stock. That sounds fair.