Very good points. Yes #2 is coming along nicely. #1 is already here if you know where to look. rpm -i and rpm -e is what I usually use but I have seen Gui versions that make it just like ms Windows. And have you seen the Redhat 8 Package Management applet? It is exactly like ms windows. #3 is actually easier on Linux than ms windows for older hardware. Have you ever tried to install an old network card or trackball that used to work under Windows95 but isn't recognized in wnidows2000 and the manufacturer has no plans to write another driver for it on the new platform? It usually just works on Linux if it already worked on an earlier kernel.
I wonder if it would be a good sub-project for Mozilla, to make a general-purpose hardware/software-installer wizard.
That's not necessary although the Mozilla installer is quite slick. Take a look at the Loki Setup Installer 1.5.8 by Sam Latinga and Stephane Peter.
http://www.lokigames.com/development/setup.php3
Joe Average shouldn't need to read any how-to's as long as he sticks with prepackaged apps that have been blessed by his distribution, but when a developer wants to get software out without having to wait on a Redhat or Suse to package his stuff and bundle it with their next distribution then he can download the Loki Setup Installer edit some XML and voila!
The biggest hole is the end user. Tight network security means nothing if the end user can run a trojanized screensaver sent to him by email or downloaded from Joe Blow's Web Emporium and infect his own machine.
And I have heard claims that as many as 90% of security breaches go undetected. Think about it. How many of even you Linux users actually run tripwire on your personal system? What percentage of people do you think even check the md5sum against their downloads before compiling as root? It is small I guarantee. I once posted the wrong md5sum for a release of an open source project and it was downloaded hundreds of times without anyone saying anything.
Another reason they go undetected is that many trojans are customized. If you were going to plant a keystroke logger on a target's computer would you use one that is found by McAfee antivirus? No. You'd compile your own; changing the signature, different size, different port, different protocol, and only use that particular version in that one instance.
Of the breaches that are detected, many are not reported. What bank or online retailer wants people to know that their personal data was stolen? So just because there hasn't been a Code Red lately doesn't mean all is well.
The best reason: Money. When there is little difference at the user interface level between the two systems then the one over-riding concern will be price. Of course there will still be differences in security, stability, robustness, performance, etc. but users and PHBs don't grok those things. Yes, choice _IS_ good.
Unfortunately, it draws a whole crowd of these other whingers from the woodwork : "Linux isn't innovative at all.
How could that happen? Since Open Source development is like a bazaar there will always be coders who do new and creative things with Linux. But that doesn't happen in the closed source cathedral style of development where you get what they give you. Once Linux has a user base on par with ms windows it will become obvious to all who the innovators are.
I'm no Linux user. I've never booted a distro of the OS in any of its flavors...
Right now, Linux has yet to offer me any reason why I should go to the monumental hassle of switching and re-training myself to the new OS environment...
This explains in a nutshell why Linux developers should concentrate, at least in the short term, on recreating the look and feel of the MS Windows desktop.
It has been explained to me that plastics also have some sort of recycling limit. I can't remember why though. Probably something to do with crosslinked polymers. I think we'll see more and more of this plastic paper though. It will be the stepping stone between paper and e-paper.
With MS Windows becoming more like Linux and Linux continually becoming more like MS Windows, pretty soon the only distinction between them will the price.
About this 2 year limit some people mentioned, it's not that simple. You start to learn language from the day you are born (if not before)
That makes sense since my first memory was before I could speak yet I knew what was being said. 'Can I hold him?' 'Let me see if I can get him to be quiet.' etc. (I was wrapped in a blanket and cried every time Mom would hand me to some unfamiliar lady.) When I asked my mother about it many years later and described the lady she had taken me to see, the surroundings, and the trailer she lived in, she knew who it was and said that I would have only been about 1 1/2 years old.
It takes about 3 years for a memory to become really permanent. Everything you remember from further back you will always remember, disregarding diseases/brain damage.
Are you sure? It seems that this memory has almost faded away though it was once fresh as could be. Maybe the caffeine and beer has caused brain damage.
For fresher things, you'll need to access the memory once in a while. Something you should think about if you spent a lot of time 1-2 years ago trying to learn a new language or similar.
I have found that when you recall something that you are fuzzy on that you can begin to remember it wrong. Not the grammar of a "new language"; that is cut and dried, but details of events, sometimes very big details.
Right on India, smart move. Here's to hoping the US government won't be the last to migrate over to common sense.
Oh, silly foreigners are always doing crazy stuff like this. How about that flash-in-the-pan metric system! [snicker] It'll never last. And right now my outdoor thermometer says 25 degrees and damn is it cold out there... just like it's supposed to be.;)
The Ms Window interface is not 'crappy'. It is composed almost completely of "borrowed" elements from competing interfaces. If those elements are now crappy then they must have been crappy also in their original forms on Unix / Linux / OS2 / Macintosh desktops. I don't think they were then or now. Though if you are saying that too many spices can ruin the stew then I would agreee with that, though KDE is more guilty in that respect I think.
Having an interface available which will require zero retraining for end users will save businesses so much money as they transition from MS lock-in to the more diverse, less expensive, more robust, equivalent Free Software. Regardless of whether an XP inspired interface becomes popular on Linux there will always be new, different, innovative, experimental interfaces being developed and available for Linux, so having one more which is perceived as familiar and intuitive to trained office drones is nothing to worry about.
You say we should not emulate what you consider a bad environment becuase people should be shown that it is not an industry standard? With all due respect, that is nonsense. Linux will never get that chance unless it can continue to grab desktop marketshare and that cannot happen unless the transition is seamless from one environment to the other. Linux must achieve parity before it could ever hope to lead people in a new direction. And due to the diverse nature of Open and Free software Linux can never force people to go anywhere; like a liquid, they will find their own path.
Lastly, the recent 'M$ FUD about the OSS community being'... essentially copycats is meant to make people like you fear being called a copycat and spending your time developing lots of new, unproven, and impractical, but innovative, and possibly occasionally successful, user interface enhancements which would make Linux an ungainly albatross but from which they could cherry pick the gems for their next platform. If you fall for this cheap psychological trick then you become MS's unpaid alpha version developers.
Was your post in response to mine? I don't believe said anything about blaming Microsoft. Or did your tinfoil hat fall off and your imaginary conversations are bleeding through into the real world?
You are right that the blame should be placed on the bank for choosing IE/Ms VM only and doing so was about as smart as parachuting without a backup chute.
Several other tidbits I didn't mention in my original post: Finance people don't like driving in to work over the holidays due to a bug in IE or a poor choice by a bank, we are switching to a new bank, and we are not a small account.
Whats particularly ridiculous is that I know people with 3 legitimate windows copies now. The one that came with their computer, the one the school paid for, and the one that they get from the CSE departments subscription to the MSDN
Most medium size companies are paying for multiple copies for each PC they own. The licenses have been written so that you have to buy Windows when you buy the computer and then buy it again under the MOLP in order to reload the system with an image containing the company's standard business tools such as an office suite, CRM package, groupware, etc. even when the same version OS is put back on the system. Next time you call for quotes on PC's, ask if you can get the systems bare with no software so you only have to pay once. They will say they can't do that, but if enough people make the request maybe some responsive person in their organization will push for it so they can lower their advertised price by a hundred bucks or so.
I used to be quite the closed-source advocate, until I started paying more attention to many of the successful open-source projects out there like say Gnome and KDE.
Let me focus the rest of my response on GUI development...
The problem I see with many closed-source projects like these is that they fail to innovate as much as they copy. If this world was 100% open source, we'd probably see more code re-use. Going from one platform to another would be a very easy process (more than it already is).
So honestly, without companies like Apple and Microsoft stealing innovations from open-source authors, we wouldn't have seen the tremendious WIMP evolution that we have over the past ten years.
In short, without open-source projects innovating to advance their products, the closed-source competition wouldn't be near as advanced.
I didn't realize that would be news worthy. It happened to me just a week ago with a major USBank. Their tech support says that only IE with MS Java will be supported. So the user is forced to use a virtual machine which is only mostly compatible with Java 1.1.4. How old is 1.1.4? But IE has a bug in its proxy code so we still couldn't get it to work even working with their so called tech support. Another program that is designed to only work with MS's ancient version of Java is Ciscoworks 2000.
Because 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.' Of course, this was written in the belief that a strong federal government was unnecessary, and Minutemen were expected to jump from their beds to defend the nation from invasion. Now we only keep it in the Constitution so after a nukular holocaust if the radioactive mutants start meandering across our texas ranch looking for food, we can pick them off from a couple of hundred yards away.
But how do you know whether they aren't already helping their region by working in sweatshops for little money and no benefits? How do you know whether the Banking and Manufacturing sector actually 'cannot be squeezed anymore' or whether there are powerful executives making thousands of times the per capita income, making the profits appear low so that those companies have to pay little or no taxes?
As for the original posters hope that U.S. thinktanks won't get the same idea, I would ask the same questions about the U.S. system.
I like this idea a lot. The government supposedly represents the people so a royalty paid to the government for a continual monopoly on materials that would otherwise be property of the Public seems quite fair. It goes a long way toward solving the basic problem which Lessig pointed out that Congress continually extends the copyright term to protect the revenue of a tiny fraction of created materials which harms the public because we are then denied the other 98% which has no commercial value. Congress would certainly go on extending copyrights ad infinitum at the behest of those few wealthy contributors who benefit monetarily, yet We the People would at least receive much of what the Founding Fathers intended.
Copyright is currently being used not just 'to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries'. The founders original term of 14 years plus an opportunity to renew for a 14 year extension would be ample for this purpose especially in today's world of "internet time" and "just-in-time" business practices. Instead long term copyright extensions are currently being used to promote the aggregation of wealth by copyright holders, not inventors, nor authors. Maybe this is not altogether such a bad thing but it is certainly not what the Contitution intended (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) nor what the Copyright Act of 1790 enacted.
Your suggestion seems to be a pragmatic compromise though I personally think the term should return to 14+14 rather than life+10 before royalties to the Public begin, and a Disney lawyer would certainly argue for much longer than even the life+70 or 95 we have now under the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act. However I fear the point at which royalties would begin would keep getting extended and the amount of the royalties would keep being reduced and the application for extensions would be made a trivial process until at some point decades in the future, we would have a situation where almost nothing enters the public domain. Of course that is already happening now so any change in the Public's favor is an improvement. Am I a realist or a cynic?
I have known many office workers who only became moderately productive using MS Office and Windows after studying books and going to classes. Contrary to your FUD, MS Windows doesn't 'just work' and it never has. There is an entire industry devoted to training users on Microsoft products and the fact that it exists is evidence that those products are not intuitive and only usable after many long hard hours of study and practice.
Furthermore, 'ease of use' is no longer a valid argument in the battle for the desktop. An office worker using X Windows has no more reason to open a command prompt than one using MS Windows. Star Office and Mozilla are accessible through icons, and the filesystem is easily accessible through Konquerer or Nautilus.
People who are resistant to switching to Linux are mostly that way because of their preconscious memories of the painful, slow learning process that they struggled through when they learned MS Windows. They fear 'learning a new operating system' when they don't even feel confident in the one they have been working on for a decade.
It is such a wonderful feeling when I show people that X Windows is just like MS Windows. Everything is done by clicking on buttons and files can be cut, copied, and pasted just like they are used to. Star Office 6 looks so similar to MS Office and Corel Office and Lotus SmartSuite that there just is no learning curve. They are immediately productive on their new, free system.
Well I have to go now and spread the joy of Linux elsewhere...
PS. What in the heck did you do for 100 hours? It took me about 10 minutes to tweak Redhat the way I like it.
You are absolutely right. The thing that you seem to 'get' about this discussion that some other posters apparently aren't old enough to know is that PC's beat Mac because of hardware. IBM virtually open sourced the PC. For a few hundred dollars anyone could buy a manual from them on how to build a PC. The only thing IBM wouldn't let you buy from overseas was the BIOS which they had copyrighted. That was their chokehold and it slipped from their grasp when Phoenix reverse engineered it. Since nobody could build a Mac but Apple but anyone could build an IBM compatible, competition by thousands of clone makers brought the price down. Microsoft had zilch to do with it, but they did ride the clonemakers coat tails since everyone needed their standardized middleware (DOS) to run those killer apps like Lotus 1-2-3.
What would that be? It sounds like what you are looking for is closed source but with the source held in escrow to be released only if your company becomes defunct. That sort of thing is already being done. My company has such an arrangement right now.
making them their cards the perfect CHEAP choice for homebrew VR developers.
Great, can you tell me where to download libraries then? I looked and looked but couldn't find a thing. Now my glasses sit unused in the original box. I would prefer Linux libs but I might use Windows 9x if there is no other choice.
My experience with these glasses (i-o glasses) was not very positive. The drivers wouldn't work worth a damn. So I downloaded drivers from their competitor and those worked somewhat. I also downloaded the Nvidia drivers. Between the three I kept ghosting my machine and reloading because once a driver was loaded it never seemed to uninstall clean so I could load a different driver. That caused the sequence of loading the drivers to make a difference and the original drivers would work after I loaded one of the other sets of drivers over the top. I had both a 3dfx banshee and a GeForce2 Mx400. The drivers seemed to want a monitor capable of unimaginably high refresh rates. I tried several monitors and they all cost plenty but could only get 3d at the lowest refresh setting. So what kind of Buck Rogers monitor do you need to buy to make the things work right?
On the other hand, I did get several games to work using various combinations and loading sequences of the drivers. Re-Volt was extremely cool in 3D and I didn't get headaches either.
They don't need to ask for the info anymore because the government is now collecting what you bought, when you bought it, how much you bought of it, where you bought it at, and whether you clicked your heels and said 'Heil Dubya!' on the way out.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it would be a good sub-project for Mozilla, to make a general-purpose hardware/software-installer wizard.
That's not necessary although the Mozilla installer is quite slick. Take a look at the Loki Setup Installer 1.5.8 by Sam Latinga and Stephane Peter. http://www.lokigames.com/development/setup.php3 Joe Average shouldn't need to read any how-to's as long as he sticks with prepackaged apps that have been blessed by his distribution, but when a developer wants to get software out without having to wait on a Redhat or Suse to package his stuff and bundle it with their next distribution then he can download the Loki Setup Installer edit some XML and voila!
The biggest hole is the end user. Tight network security means nothing if the end user can run a trojanized screensaver sent to him by email or downloaded from Joe Blow's Web Emporium and infect his own machine.
And I have heard claims that as many as 90% of security breaches go undetected. Think about it. How many of even you Linux users actually run tripwire on your personal system? What percentage of people do you think even check the md5sum against their downloads before compiling as root? It is small I guarantee. I once posted the wrong md5sum for a release of an open source project and it was downloaded hundreds of times without anyone saying anything.
Another reason they go undetected is that many trojans are customized. If you were going to plant a keystroke logger on a target's computer would you use one that is found by McAfee antivirus? No. You'd compile your own; changing the signature, different size, different port, different protocol, and only use that particular version in that one instance.
Of the breaches that are detected, many are not reported. What bank or online retailer wants people to know that their personal data was stolen? So just because there hasn't been a Code Red lately doesn't mean all is well.
The best reason: Money. When there is little difference at the user interface level between the two systems then the one over-riding concern will be price. Of course there will still be differences in security, stability, robustness, performance, etc. but users and PHBs don't grok those things. Yes, choice _IS_ good.
How could that happen? Since Open Source development is like a bazaar there will always be coders who do new and creative things with Linux. But that doesn't happen in the closed source cathedral style of development where you get what they give you. Once Linux has a user base on par with ms windows it will become obvious to all who the innovators are.
Nice characterization of Dvorak by the way.
Right now, Linux has yet to offer me any reason why I should go to the monumental hassle of switching and re-training myself to the new OS environment...
This explains in a nutshell why Linux developers should concentrate, at least in the short term, on recreating the look and feel of the MS Windows desktop.
It has been explained to me that plastics also have some sort of recycling limit. I can't remember why though. Probably something to do with crosslinked polymers. I think we'll see more and more of this plastic paper though. It will be the stepping stone between paper and e-paper.
With MS Windows becoming more like Linux and Linux continually becoming more like MS Windows, pretty soon the only distinction between them will the price.
That makes sense since my first memory was before I could speak yet I knew what was being said. 'Can I hold him?' 'Let me see if I can get him to be quiet.' etc. (I was wrapped in a blanket and cried every time Mom would hand me to some unfamiliar lady.) When I asked my mother about it many years later and described the lady she had taken me to see, the surroundings, and the trailer she lived in, she knew who it was and said that I would have only been about 1 1/2 years old.
It takes about 3 years for a memory to become really permanent. Everything you remember from further back you will always remember, disregarding diseases/brain damage.
Are you sure? It seems that this memory has almost faded away though it was once fresh as could be. Maybe the caffeine and beer has caused brain damage.
For fresher things, you'll need to access the memory once in a while. Something you should think about if you spent a lot of time 1-2 years ago trying to learn a new language or similar.
I have found that when you recall something that you are fuzzy on that you can begin to remember it wrong. Not the grammar of a "new language"; that is cut and dried, but details of events, sometimes very big details.
Oh, silly foreigners are always doing crazy stuff like this. How about that flash-in-the-pan metric system! [snicker] It'll never last. And right now my outdoor thermometer says 25 degrees and damn is it cold out there... just like it's supposed to be. ;)
I respectfully disagree.
The Ms Window interface is not 'crappy'. It is composed almost completely of "borrowed" elements from competing interfaces. If those elements are now crappy then they must have been crappy also in their original forms on Unix / Linux / OS2 / Macintosh desktops. I don't think they were then or now. Though if you are saying that too many spices can ruin the stew then I would agreee with that, though KDE is more guilty in that respect I think.
Having an interface available which will require zero retraining for end users will save businesses so much money as they transition from MS lock-in to the more diverse, less expensive, more robust, equivalent Free Software. Regardless of whether an XP inspired interface becomes popular on Linux there will always be new, different, innovative, experimental interfaces being developed and available for Linux, so having one more which is perceived as familiar and intuitive to trained office drones is nothing to worry about.
You say we should not emulate what you consider a bad environment becuase people should be shown that it is not an industry standard? With all due respect, that is nonsense. Linux will never get that chance unless it can continue to grab desktop marketshare and that cannot happen unless the transition is seamless from one environment to the other. Linux must achieve parity before it could ever hope to lead people in a new direction. And due to the diverse nature of Open and Free software Linux can never force people to go anywhere; like a liquid, they will find their own path.
Lastly, the recent 'M$ FUD about the OSS community being'... essentially copycats is meant to make people like you fear being called a copycat and spending your time developing lots of new, unproven, and impractical, but innovative, and possibly occasionally successful, user interface enhancements which would make Linux an ungainly albatross but from which they could cherry pick the gems for their next platform. If you fall for this cheap psychological trick then you become MS's unpaid alpha version developers.
Was your post in response to mine? I don't believe said anything about blaming Microsoft. Or did your tinfoil hat fall off and your imaginary conversations are bleeding through into the real world?
You are right that the blame should be placed on the bank for choosing IE/Ms VM only and doing so was about as smart as parachuting without a backup chute.
Several other tidbits I didn't mention in my original post: Finance people don't like driving in to work over the holidays due to a bug in IE or a poor choice by a bank, we are switching to a new bank, and we are not a small account.
Say hi to your imaginary friends for me.
Most medium size companies are paying for multiple copies for each PC they own. The licenses have been written so that you have to buy Windows when you buy the computer and then buy it again under the MOLP in order to reload the system with an image containing the company's standard business tools such as an office suite, CRM package, groupware, etc. even when the same version OS is put back on the system. Next time you call for quotes on PC's, ask if you can get the systems bare with no software so you only have to pay once. They will say they can't do that, but if enough people make the request maybe some responsive person in their organization will push for it so they can lower their advertised price by a hundred bucks or so.
I used to be quite the closed-source advocate, until I started paying more attention to many of the successful open-source projects out there like say Gnome and KDE.
Let me focus the rest of my response on GUI development...
The problem I see with many closed-source projects like these is that they fail to innovate as much as they copy. If this world was 100% open source, we'd probably see more code re-use. Going from one platform to another would be a very easy process (more than it already is).
So honestly, without companies like Apple and Microsoft stealing innovations from open-source authors, we wouldn't have seen the tremendious WIMP evolution that we have over the past ten years.
In short, without open-source projects innovating to advance their products, the closed-source competition wouldn't be near as advanced.
I didn't realize that would be news worthy. It happened to me just a week ago with a major USBank. Their tech support says that only IE with MS Java will be supported. So the user is forced to use a virtual machine which is only mostly compatible with Java 1.1.4. How old is 1.1.4? But IE has a bug in its proxy code so we still couldn't get it to work even working with their so called tech support. Another program that is designed to only work with MS's ancient version of Java is Ciscoworks 2000.
Because 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.' Of course, this was written in the belief that a strong federal government was unnecessary, and Minutemen were expected to jump from their beds to defend the nation from invasion. Now we only keep it in the Constitution so after a nukular holocaust if the radioactive mutants start meandering across our texas ranch looking for food, we can pick them off from a couple of hundred yards away.
As for the original posters hope that U.S. thinktanks won't get the same idea, I would ask the same questions about the U.S. system.
Copyright is currently being used not just 'to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries'. The founders original term of 14 years plus an opportunity to renew for a 14 year extension would be ample for this purpose especially in today's world of "internet time" and "just-in-time" business practices. Instead long term copyright extensions are currently being used to promote the aggregation of wealth by copyright holders, not inventors, nor authors. Maybe this is not altogether such a bad thing but it is certainly not what the Contitution intended (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) nor what the Copyright Act of 1790 enacted.
Your suggestion seems to be a pragmatic compromise though I personally think the term should return to 14+14 rather than life+10 before royalties to the Public begin, and a Disney lawyer would certainly argue for much longer than even the life+70 or 95 we have now under the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act. However I fear the point at which royalties would begin would keep getting extended and the amount of the royalties would keep being reduced and the application for extensions would be made a trivial process until at some point decades in the future, we would have a situation where almost nothing enters the public domain. Of course that is already happening now so any change in the Public's favor is an improvement. Am I a realist or a cynic?
Maybe but it would take 10 years and a incorruptible Department of Justice to prove it.
I have known many office workers who only became moderately productive using MS Office and Windows after studying books and going to classes. Contrary to your FUD, MS Windows doesn't 'just work' and it never has. There is an entire industry devoted to training users on Microsoft products and the fact that it exists is evidence that those products are not intuitive and only usable after many long hard hours of study and practice.
Furthermore, 'ease of use' is no longer a valid argument in the battle for the desktop. An office worker using X Windows has no more reason to open a command prompt than one using MS Windows. Star Office and Mozilla are accessible through icons, and the filesystem is easily accessible through Konquerer or Nautilus.
People who are resistant to switching to Linux are mostly that way because of their preconscious memories of the painful, slow learning process that they struggled through when they learned MS Windows. They fear 'learning a new operating system' when they don't even feel confident in the one they have been working on for a decade.
It is such a wonderful feeling when I show people that X Windows is just like MS Windows. Everything is done by clicking on buttons and files can be cut, copied, and pasted just like they are used to. Star Office 6 looks so similar to MS Office and Corel Office and Lotus SmartSuite that there just is no learning curve. They are immediately productive on their new, free system.
Well I have to go now and spread the joy of Linux elsewhere...
PS. What in the heck did you do for 100 hours? It took me about 10 minutes to tweak Redhat the way I like it.
You are absolutely right. The thing that you seem to 'get' about this discussion that some other posters apparently aren't old enough to know is that PC's beat Mac because of hardware. IBM virtually open sourced the PC. For a few hundred dollars anyone could buy a manual from them on how to build a PC. The only thing IBM wouldn't let you buy from overseas was the BIOS which they had copyrighted. That was their chokehold and it slipped from their grasp when Phoenix reverse engineered it. Since nobody could build a Mac but Apple but anyone could build an IBM compatible, competition by thousands of clone makers brought the price down. Microsoft had zilch to do with it, but they did ride the clonemakers coat tails since everyone needed their standardized middleware (DOS) to run those killer apps like Lotus 1-2-3.
I wonder if his punishment will be to be kicked in the bum with an enormous boot?
Mail any lucrative^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h job offers to:
Former MIS Director,
Beth Israel Deaconess hospital
Boston, MA 02215
What would that be? It sounds like what you are looking for is closed source but with the source held in escrow to be released only if your company becomes defunct. That sort of thing is already being done. My company has such an arrangement right now.
Great, can you tell me where to download libraries then? I looked and looked but couldn't find a thing. Now my glasses sit unused in the original box. I would prefer Linux libs but I might use Windows 9x if there is no other choice.
My experience with these glasses (i-o glasses) was not very positive. The drivers wouldn't work worth a damn. So I downloaded drivers from their competitor and those worked somewhat. I also downloaded the Nvidia drivers. Between the three I kept ghosting my machine and reloading because once a driver was loaded it never seemed to uninstall clean so I could load a different driver. That caused the sequence of loading the drivers to make a difference and the original drivers would work after I loaded one of the other sets of drivers over the top. I had both a 3dfx banshee and a GeForce2 Mx400. The drivers seemed to want a monitor capable of unimaginably high refresh rates. I tried several monitors and they all cost plenty but could only get 3d at the lowest refresh setting. So what kind of Buck Rogers monitor do you need to buy to make the things work right?
On the other hand, I did get several games to work using various combinations and loading sequences of the drivers. Re-Volt was extremely cool in 3D and I didn't get headaches either.
They don't need to ask for the info anymore because the government is now collecting what you bought, when you bought it, how much you bought of it, where you bought it at, and whether you clicked your heels and said 'Heil Dubya!' on the way out.