> Although I have to point out that by saing > "There's Cringely too" you kind of implied > that RMS actually talked about SCO instead > of just recycling the standard FSF "Say, > would you like to try GNU Hurd?" press release.
RMS's point is most of the codebase that makes up what the average person things of as "Linux" was written for GNU. GNU was explicit written to be free; careful attention was paid to avoid allowing any party leverage over the codebase.
RMS is arguing that there is actually very limited range to SCO's lawsuit. If everything SCO has said is true, at the worst you'd have to run all the same software... on a different kernel. RMS points out that there are several alternate kernels, which already run much of the same software as "Linux".
If it was common knowledge that almost everything in "Linux" any user ever interacts with has been vetted against any SCO-like claims, this story would have even fewer legs than it does now.
I forget the names of the SCO executives, so I rolled them together. also, IANAL.
SCO made this one over and over again -- the current court case is based on SCO's position as the owner of UNIX and UNIXWARE contracts, not as the owner of copyrights or patents. SCO pointed out how almost every Fortune 500 company is a SCO licensee.
SCO did claim to own those copyrights and patents, and SCO claim the right to take action on those copyrights and patents at their discrection. SCO explained (with a perhaps poor choice of words) that the contractual rights are "aces" and that the copyright and patent rights are "a seven and a five".
SCO did mention that SCO requested "clarification" from Novell on particular areas of the contract. I don't remember if SCO stated whether SCO received clarification from Novell.
SCO did not mention OpenGroup, nor were any of the questions about OpenGroup.
SCO's claims concern the 2.4 kernel. [Think they're upset about the S/390 support? Or how about AIX / Linux integration -- did that happen around 2.4?]
SCO stated that June would be the month of proof. However, SCO also stated that they would be opening source code to their customers, and members of the media, who sign NDA's. I don't remember from the call if June is the month of proof in the courts, or if it is the month of NDA's.
Personally, the NDA's sounded a bit B.S. -- simply signing an NDA would prevent one from removing the code from the kernel, because to remove the code from the kernel would reveal information subject to the NDA!
To me, this sounds like SCO wants to take advantage of their position as "Owner of Unix" to extort license fees from existing licensees (licensees =~ the Fortune 500). By keeping information actual patent / copyright violations under wraps, said licensees can't reduce their exposure by fixing Linux instead of using SCO Unix.
Maybe there's something like a EULA in the SCO license that tells IBM "You can't support S/390 on anything that competes with SCO Unix". Or something. I dunno.
It causes confusion for these two particular projects to share the same name.
I build intranet websites. I use the Firebird browser to visit said websites. I use the Firebird database to build said websites. The important part: these two components are parts of an overall intranet solution. From the POV of a businessman, they merge into the same thing.
Now, when explaining technology choices to that businessman, I get to dance around "Firebird the database" and "Firebird the browser". When installing software for that businessman, I have to ensure they don't mangle the "c:\Program Files\Firebird" directory.
1. You have the right to fork a project, or fork over the cash to a developer. INo one is obliged to help you, but you are welcome to help yourself.
2. Content Management is an absurdly broad problem. You might be different, but I'd be better of researching a good serialization strategy and GUI builder for my favorite language.
3. Apache 2.0 changed the C interfaces used by the mod_ tie-ins. There are higher profile projects than WebGUI that are not available for Apache 2.0 (like mod_ruby); WebGUI might be affected by this. Try using a 1.x Apache.
I just got a cellphone module for my Handspring Visor. That nice address book becomes much more exciting when you just hit a button to call the number.
The nature of distributed collaboration leads much better documentation. On many open source projects, the manual is actually a source of information. See debian's policy.html for a good example. For similar reasons, open source news groups usually have much more helpful information than vendor groups.
Most of the time googling will lead to exactly the answer you need in very little time. Sometimes, all you need to do is cut and paste the error message into groups.google.com to get an answer.
And if you want to buy support, you can still purchase it from RedHat, etc. But I heard a dirty little secret from some folks who sell support for Perl -- it doesn't really need it:-)
The Subversion folks would like nothing better than to displace BK.
Larry McVoy has an entirely reasonable business concern. He has also now provided the momentum for that concern to materialize. This may provide the motivation for Subversion to produce the cvs.succ that we all wish for late at nights, writing posts such as this one.
The real story behind United Linux is the fact that the companies involved want to save development $$ and they had to come up with some sort of license that all the parties could agree to.
No, the real story is that Red Hat is owning the server linux market, and the other vendors are grouping together to provide competition.
From my experience, the benefits of a test suite increase dramatically the closer you get to full coverage. Some tests are always better than none at all: 25% coverage is better than completely untested. But 50% coverage is much better than 25%, and the closer you get to 100% the greater the benefits you will encounter.
There are obvious benefits of high coverage, such as the ability to refactor with confidence. But high coverage has unexpected benefits. For example, reorganizing hard to test code often has the benefit of reducing unnecessary dependencies.
Unfortunately, getting high coverage requires discipline. Test first coding is a good guideline to achieve higher coverage.
Also, INHO, the testing program should start from the developers pov, not from the clients. The business problems of programming originate in the programming process, not idiot clients. I believe you get a better value by improving the programming process, then adding other QA processes as needed.
i.e., test first coding will pick up a large percentage of your qa issues. Issues that are not picked up by test first coding should be addressed by other processes. However, in many common small scale efforts test-first coding will take care of enough issues that another formal process is not needed.
written speech (programming languages) is the primary means of controlling a computer. I don't see why the proper vocabulary and hardware wouldn't be a useful control system.
Basically he doesn't understand what GNOME and KDE are, and since we're all holier-than-thou know-it-alls around here, we might as well laugh at Microsoft's expense;)
The linked article clearly states:
When government attorney Kevin Hodges asked him to name an operating system besides those made by Microsoft in which the Web browsing software could not be removed. Madnick immediately offered up KDE as an example. But KDE is a computer program designed to run on top of the Linux operating system, as Hodges pointed out. Madnick conceded that was true, and instead suggested GNOME as an example.
But GNOME performs the same function as KDE on a computer equipped with the Linux operating system. Hodges was never able to get an answer to his question.
KDE and Gnome are in no way tied to Linux, not in the way IE is tied to Windows. You can build them on many different versions of Unix, from FreeBSD to Solaris to AIX. They aren't even tied to a particular graphics subsystem -- you can run them with different Xs.
The legal issue is not just the integration from the user's perspective -- it's the ability of a supplier to choose what enviroment to present to the user. With KDE and GNOME, a supplier has tremendous lattitude to customize the enviroment for their customers. This world is completely different from the Windows world.
This speech is another attempt to lay blame for the failure of broadband a lack of demand. Supposedly, if only we had TV on the pipes then we'd have a *real* demand for broadband.
This forgets the fact that users *do* want broadband -- lots of them. The problem with broadband is not one of demand, but one of supply.
I know for a fact that I and many of my peers would pay for broadband tomorrow if I could, but it isn't available in my hip New York neighborhood. Why isn't it available? Because Verizon doesn't have the resources in place to offer it to me.
The failure of broadband is the failure of deregulation. If America really wants to have an "Internet Superhighway", then we must subsidize the superhighways the same way we subsidize the Interstates.
All this speech really is a prelude to more stupid encryption laws -- it has nothing to do with solving the problem of broadband.
The normalized form of many (if not most) kinds of data is not hierarchical.
Think about it: how do you represent complex "types" of things in a strict tree? Is that person a client? Or are they a contractor? Or are they an employee? How do you represent these things while keeping just agile enough for the future?
The stupidest thing about xml is that it is strictly hierarchical. XML is an extension of printing idioms, and it leads to the same dopish proliferation of records that is documented in Brazil.
Do yourself a favor: Don't force everything into the same hole. That's why we have squares and circles.
A peer of mine is a sys admin for a group of debian machines. Once a week he runs apt to automatically get all the security updates and install them.
This is a one liner for him. According to him, it will even download an updated ftp package, stop the ftp daemon, install the new package, then restart the daemon -- all while he twiddles his thumbs and thinks about lunch.
With that kind of automated maintenance, the window between the discovery of an exploit and the patching of the server is quite small.
Even without the beauty of apt, most unix distros generally have better packaging then windows. Unix was designed to be able to be updated frequently and incrementally (without reboots too!). Because of this I think it will be always easier to apply hotfixes/patches to a unix machine than to a windows machine.
The syntax of a computer language is expressive in the same manner as the syntax of a natural language.
In Section 1.2 of Programming Perl, Larry Wall describes the base structures of the Perl language using linguistic examples.
The nouns of Perl are variables.
A variable is just a handy place to keep something, a place with a name, so you know where to find your special something when you come back looking for it later.[italics and bold added]
Nouns can be singular or plural:
We call a singular variable a scalar, and a plural variable an array
The verbs of Perl are the operators and sub-routines. Verbs are also sometimes called subroutines (when user-defined) or operators (when built-in).
They are often imperative:
As is typical of your typical imperative computer language, many of the verbs in Perl are commands: they tell the Perl interpreter to do something.
Verbs can also be interrogative:
Some verbs are for asking questions, and are useful in conditional statements.
I want to get this post up soon, but I'm sure I could find a code example for every language structure expressed in English 101.
(Code also has the ability to express metaphor in a powerful way. Music visualization plugins like G-Force translate sound into visuals, etc.)
2.) Code is most commonly used to express real-world concepts in a structured manner.
Nearly all business programming consists of expressing real-world Things and their Capabilities in an ordered manner. For example, a short piece of Java code:
public interface ShoppingCart {
public void addProduct( Product p );// add a product to the Shopping Cart
public boolean checkOut();// return true if successful checkout
}
This is an expression of a real-world Thing ( a grocery cart ) and what can be done with that Thing( add products to the cart, check out ).
Then what is the difference between computer languages and natural languages?
The only difference is that computer languages have rules, natural languages have parameters. Every statement in a computer language is ordered, while statements in natural languages may or may not be ordered. The ordered nature of computer languages does not mean that all programs are a set of instructions. In object oriented programming attention is given to the relationships between the Objects (Design Patterns).
Code can express a wide range of properties of real world things, processes, and relationships. This expression of real world properties is not merely an enumeration (like a phone book), but a metaphor used to make certain tasks understandable to those who read the code. Let me repeat... the only difference between computer and natural languages is that computer languages are structured. Last time I checked, I don't think that being structured makes speech less expressive or ineligible for First Amendment protections.
P.S.: I realize that instructions in the form of programs can be performed by a computer; but this is analagous to saying that bomb instructions in the form of a book can be performed by an individual. The law protects the Anarchist Cookbook, and it should protect any form of code as well. A complementary legal tactic could be to dredge up case history where instructions to perform illegal actions were protected as speech.
Just how often does a painter immersed in the creative act stop to think about minutiae of the paintbrush? Or worse still, get interrupted by the paintbrush
Well, since I happen to be a painter the answer would have to be every time I work on anything of value. I demand the most out of my tools -- I use them intimately. I stretch their possiblities as far as I can. And for that purpose, I must be completely aware of every physical aspect of their functioning.
Example: A brush that is 1/2" thick is better at drawing a 1mm line than any tiny brush. How? You just use one bristle. If I got handed a 1mm brush, even if that was the tool I was *supposed* to use for the job, I would be quite upset.
The Mac fails because it tries to mask its nature from you. For certain problems it is very user-unfriendly. You have trouble with the OS, and you have no information and no hope of isolating it (without the aid of serious Kung Fu). This makes it completely unsuitable for those who demand the most out of their computers. (ever tried to code on a Mac? No wonder they are dependant on MS for application support....)
When I was trying to break into a web production job doing HTML, it took me 3 monthes to find a job. This was in New York a year ago, at the peak of the internet bubble.
When it happened I got 2 offers on the same day. I think alot of it is getting better at your cover letter and interview each time, until finally you can break through that wall. One of the offering employees thought I'd been coached b/c I gave him the "right" answer to each question -- that comes from experience.
I sent out at least 10 resumes a day ( because that number of resumes would get me an interview every other day ). Remember the law of averages, and the more you send out the more likely you are to get an interview. The more interviews you get the more experience you will have.
In the article they mention different 16bit machines behaving differently. This is (at least partly) because 16bit color on Windows sets the system palette to represent the background image as well as possible. If you have different background images, the machines will have different system palettes.
There shouldn't be any complaining about a lack of standard. Pretty much every new video card can display 24bit color at resolutions above and beyond monitor technology. 16bit was just a temporary midpoint in the evolution of graphics cards to true color. Though it will take a while, color compatiblity debates will become less important. Taste is a different matter...
If I'm not mistaken, this comes under the heading of "look and feel". Which is fair game ever since that lotus 1-2-3 court case years and years ago.
Besides that...
Tabs are a common feature in current gui's. Adobe should also be suing Microsoft, IBM (OS/2 used tabbed properties palettes), NetObjects, etc., etc. Is Adobe going to argue that the unique invention is the use of tabbed properties palettes in a graphics program, but not in a Operating System?
Macromedia could certainly argue that they were just trying to create an interface that matched the operating system. Then Adobe would have to sue Microsoft / etc. just to show that they are not selectively enforcing the patent (which will invalidate it). That probably wouldn't make much business sense.
For what it's worth, here's macromedia's dull corporate response.
Slashdot Mirror
Think a branding-smart company like IBM would "accidently" pick that name?
> Although I have to point out that by saing
> "There's Cringely too" you kind of implied
> that RMS actually talked about SCO instead
> of just recycling the standard FSF "Say,
> would you like to try GNU Hurd?" press release.
RMS's point is most of the codebase that makes up what the average person things of as "Linux" was written for GNU. GNU was explicit written to be free; careful attention was paid to avoid allowing any party leverage over the codebase.
RMS is arguing that there is actually very limited range to SCO's lawsuit. If everything SCO has said is true, at the worst you'd have to run all the same software... on a different kernel. RMS points out that there are several alternate kernels, which already run much of the same software as "Linux".
If it was common knowledge that almost everything in "Linux" any user ever interacts with has been vetted against any SCO-like claims, this story would have even fewer legs than it does now.
I forget the names of the SCO executives, so I rolled them together. also, IANAL.
SCO did claim to own those copyrights and patents, and SCO claim the right to take action on those copyrights and patents at their discrection. SCO explained (with a perhaps poor choice of words) that the contractual rights are "aces" and that the copyright and patent rights are "a seven and a five".
Personally, the NDA's sounded a bit B.S. -- simply signing an NDA would prevent one from removing the code from the kernel, because to remove the code from the kernel would reveal information subject to the NDA!
To me, this sounds like SCO wants to take advantage of their position as "Owner of Unix" to extort license fees from existing licensees (licensees =~ the Fortune 500). By keeping information actual patent / copyright violations under wraps, said licensees can't reduce their exposure by fixing Linux instead of using SCO Unix.
Maybe there's something like a EULA in the SCO license that tells IBM "You can't support S/390 on anything that competes with SCO Unix". Or something. I dunno.
Cheers,
~ patSPLAT
Cash Rules Everything Around Me
It causes confusion for these two particular projects to share the same name.
I build intranet websites. I use the Firebird browser to visit said websites. I use the Firebird database to build said websites. The important part: these two components are parts of an overall intranet solution. From the POV of a businessman, they merge into the same thing.
Now, when explaining technology choices to that businessman, I get to dance around "Firebird the database" and "Firebird the browser". When installing software for that businessman, I have to ensure they don't mangle the "c:\Program Files\Firebird" directory.
It's confusing, silly, and avoidable.
1. You have the right to fork a project, or fork over the cash to a developer. INo one is obliged to help you, but you are welcome to help yourself.
2. Content Management is an absurdly broad problem. You might be different, but I'd be better of researching a good serialization strategy and GUI builder for my favorite language.
3. Apache 2.0 changed the C interfaces used by the mod_ tie-ins. There are higher profile projects than WebGUI that are not available for Apache 2.0 (like mod_ruby); WebGUI might be affected by this. Try using a 1.x Apache.
I just got a cellphone module for my Handspring Visor. That nice address book becomes much more exciting when you just hit a button to call the number.
~ Patrick
The nature of distributed collaboration leads much better documentation. On many open source projects, the manual is actually a source of information. See debian's policy.html for a good example. For similar reasons, open source news groups usually have much more helpful information than vendor groups.
:-)
Most of the time googling will lead to exactly the answer you need in very little time. Sometimes, all you need to do is cut and paste the error message into groups.google.com to get an answer.
And if you want to buy support, you can still purchase it from RedHat, etc. But I heard a dirty little secret from some folks who sell support for Perl -- it doesn't really need it
~ Patrick
Larry McVoy has an entirely reasonable business concern. He has also now provided the momentum for that concern to materialize. This may provide the motivation for Subversion to produce the cvs.succ that we all wish for late at nights, writing posts such as this one.
~ pS
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki
No, the real story is that Red Hat is owning the server linux market, and the other vendors are grouping together to provide competition.
I second this opinion.
From my experience, the benefits of a test suite increase dramatically the closer you get to full coverage. Some tests are always better than none at all: 25% coverage is better than completely untested. But 50% coverage is much better than 25%, and the closer you get to 100% the greater the benefits you will encounter.
There are obvious benefits of high coverage, such as the ability to refactor with confidence. But high coverage has unexpected benefits. For example, reorganizing hard to test code often has the benefit of reducing unnecessary dependencies.
Unfortunately, getting high coverage requires discipline. Test first coding is a good guideline to achieve higher coverage.
Also, INHO, the testing program should start from the developers pov, not from the clients. The business problems of programming originate in the programming process, not idiot clients. I believe you get a better value by improving the programming process, then adding other QA processes as needed.
i.e., test first coding will pick up a large percentage of your qa issues. Issues that are not picked up by test first coding should be addressed by other processes. However, in many common small scale efforts test-first coding will take care of enough issues that another formal process is not needed.
written speech (programming languages) is the primary means of controlling a computer. I don't see why the proper vocabulary and hardware wouldn't be a useful control system.
The linked article clearly states:
KDE and Gnome are in no way tied to Linux, not in the way IE is tied to Windows. You can build them on many different versions of Unix, from FreeBSD to Solaris to AIX. They aren't even tied to a particular graphics subsystem -- you can run them with different Xs.
The legal issue is not just the integration from the user's perspective -- it's the ability of a supplier to choose what enviroment to present to the user. With KDE and GNOME, a supplier has tremendous lattitude to customize the enviroment for their customers. This world is completely different from the Windows world.
This speech is another attempt to lay blame for the failure of broadband a lack of demand. Supposedly, if only we had TV on the pipes then we'd have a *real* demand for broadband.
This forgets the fact that users *do* want broadband -- lots of them. The problem with broadband is not one of demand, but one of supply.
I know for a fact that I and many of my peers would pay for broadband tomorrow if I could, but it isn't available in my hip New York neighborhood. Why isn't it available? Because Verizon doesn't have the resources in place to offer it to me.
The failure of broadband is the failure of deregulation. If America really wants to have an "Internet Superhighway", then we must subsidize the superhighways the same way we subsidize the Interstates.
All this speech really is a prelude to more stupid encryption laws -- it has nothing to do with solving the problem of broadband.
The normalized form of many (if not most) kinds of data is not hierarchical.
Think about it: how do you represent complex "types" of things in a strict tree? Is that person a client? Or are they a contractor? Or are they an employee? How do you represent these things while keeping just agile enough for the future?
The stupidest thing about xml is that it is strictly hierarchical. XML is an extension of printing idioms, and it leads to the same dopish proliferation of records that is documented in Brazil.
Do yourself a favor: Don't force everything into the same hole. That's why we have squares and circles.
A peer of mine is a sys admin for a group of debian machines. Once a week he runs apt to automatically get all the security updates and install them.
This is a one liner for him. According to him, it will even download an updated ftp package, stop the ftp daemon, install the new package, then restart the daemon -- all while he twiddles his thumbs and thinks about lunch.
With that kind of automated maintenance, the window between the discovery of an exploit and the patching of the server is quite small.
Even without the beauty of apt, most unix distros generally have better packaging then windows. Unix was designed to be able to be updated frequently and incrementally (without reboots too!). Because of this I think it will be always easier to apply hotfixes/patches to a unix machine than to a windows machine.
- 1.) Code uses linguistic devices.
- The nouns of Perl are variables.
A variable is just a handy place to keep something, a place with a name, so you know where to find your special something when you come back looking for it later.[italics and bold added]
Nouns can be singular or plural:
We call a singular variable a scalar, and a plural variable an array
- The verbs of Perl are the operators and sub-routines.
- 2.) Code is most commonly used to express real-world concepts in a structured manner.
Then what is the difference between computer languages and natural languages?The syntax of a computer language is expressive in the same manner as the syntax of a natural language. In Section 1.2 of Programming Perl, Larry Wall describes the base structures of the Perl language using linguistic examples.
Verbs are also sometimes called subroutines (when user-defined) or operators (when built-in). They are often imperative: As is typical of your typical imperative computer language, many of the verbs in Perl are commands: they tell the Perl interpreter to do something. Verbs can also be interrogative: Some verbs are for asking questions, and are useful in conditional statements.
I want to get this post up soon, but I'm sure I could find a code example for every language structure expressed in English 101.
(Code also has the ability to express metaphor in a powerful way. Music visualization plugins like G-Force translate sound into visuals, etc.)
Nearly all business programming consists of expressing real-world Things and their Capabilities in an ordered manner. For example, a short piece of Java code: public interface ShoppingCart { public void addProduct( Product p ); // add a product to the Shopping Cart
public boolean checkOut(); // return true if successful checkout
}
This is an expression of a real-world Thing ( a grocery cart ) and what can be done with that Thing( add products to the cart, check out ).
The only difference is that computer languages have rules, natural languages have parameters. Every statement in a computer language is ordered, while statements in natural languages may or may not be ordered. The ordered nature of computer languages does not mean that all programs are a set of instructions. In object oriented programming attention is given to the relationships between the Objects (Design Patterns).
Code can express a wide range of properties of real world things, processes, and relationships. This expression of real world properties is not merely an enumeration (like a phone book), but a metaphor used to make certain tasks understandable to those who read the code. Let me repeat... the only difference between computer and natural languages is that computer languages are structured. Last time I checked, I don't think that being structured makes speech less expressive or ineligible for First Amendment protections.
P.S.: I realize that instructions in the form of programs can be performed by a computer; but this is analagous to saying that bomb instructions in the form of a book can be performed by an individual. The law protects the Anarchist Cookbook, and it should protect any form of code as well. A complementary legal tactic could be to dredge up case history where instructions to perform illegal actions were protected as speech.
sigh....
Well, since I happen to be a painter the answer would have to be every time I work on anything of value. I demand the most out of my tools -- I use them intimately. I stretch their possiblities as far as I can. And for that purpose, I must be completely aware of every physical aspect of their functioning.
Example: A brush that is 1/2" thick is better at drawing a 1mm line than any tiny brush. How? You just use one bristle. If I got handed a 1mm brush, even if that was the tool I was *supposed* to use for the job, I would be quite upset.
The Mac fails because it tries to mask its nature from you. For certain problems it is very user-unfriendly. You have trouble with the OS, and you have no information and no hope of isolating it (without the aid of serious Kung Fu). This makes it completely unsuitable for those who demand the most out of their computers. (ever tried to code on a Mac? No wonder they are dependant on MS for application support....)
It's not too hard to do a search for the Author and turn up the original article...
When I was trying to break into a web production job doing HTML, it took me 3 monthes to find a job. This was in New York a year ago, at the peak of the internet bubble.
When it happened I got 2 offers on the same day. I think alot of it is getting better at your cover letter and interview each time, until finally you can break through that wall. One of the offering employees thought I'd been coached b/c I gave him the "right" answer to each question -- that comes from experience.
I sent out at least 10 resumes a day ( because that number of resumes would get me an interview every other day ). Remember the law of averages, and the more you send out the more likely you are to get an interview. The more interviews you get the more experience you will have.
And then you will get at job doing what you want!
In the article they mention different 16bit machines behaving differently. This is (at least partly) because 16bit color on Windows sets the system palette to represent the background image as well as possible. If you have different background images, the machines will have different system palettes.
There shouldn't be any complaining about a lack of standard. Pretty much every new video card can display 24bit color at resolutions above and beyond monitor technology. 16bit was just a temporary midpoint in the evolution of graphics cards to true color. Though it will take a while, color compatiblity debates will become less important. Taste is a different matter...
Here is the actual text of the judge's decision:
acrobat format
If I'm not mistaken, this comes under the heading of "look and feel". Which is fair game ever since that lotus 1-2-3 court case years and years ago.
Besides that...
Tabs are a common feature in current gui's. Adobe should also be suing Microsoft, IBM (OS/2 used tabbed properties palettes), NetObjects, etc., etc. Is Adobe going to argue that the unique invention is the use of tabbed properties palettes in a graphics program, but not in a Operating System?
Macromedia could certainly argue that they were just trying to create an interface that matched the operating system. Then Adobe would have to sue Microsoft / etc. just to show that they are not selectively enforcing the patent (which will invalidate it). That probably wouldn't make much business sense.
For what it's worth, here's macromedia's dull corporate response.