"That was ten months ago they where supposed to of removed the code *OR* put up the GPL violation."
I've seen this quite a few times with companies known or accused of violating the GPL (Sony was one I actively persued for this exact issue). They claimed they were going to release the source "after they cleaned it up a bit", but they had binaries out there already built with that "unclean" source.
The problem is, "cleaned-up source" builds a different binary, and THAT binary has to be released as well. Its not good enough.
Sony tried to skirt around the issue by releasing v2.0 binaries, and then at the same time, releasing v1.0 sources, so you could never get the source to the binaries already available, until 3.0 came out. You were always kept one release behind current, with the source. Presumably this was to "slow you down". Bastards.
"Theres only one legal way for the IMBlaze people to resolve this, and thats to put up the code or remove the download."
...and pay the fines for their existing violations levied by the court, of course.
If I kill someone and apologize to the family for my crimes, and promise never to kill again... am I set free? No.
The same applies here, and I'm firm when I state that companies should NOT get away with this, and EVERY company found to be violating copyright, needs to be publically stated, viewed, and seen by the public at large for what they've done.
It should HURT their bottom line, their core business, to be publically put on the towne square in the stockade as a license violator.
"The Gaim developers are probably owed the entire revenue stream the product made, because IMBlaze are wrongfully claiming someone elses product as there own and charging people money for it.... and possibly triple damage style too because IMBLaze *HAS* been informed."
This is actually called a "Lanham Act" violation ("...false designation of origin").
On top of that, basically its a GPL violation, which removed their right to continue to distribute or sell that software, and EVERY SINGLE SALE or DOWNLOAD is now a separate copyright violation, punishable by $20,000/USD to $200,000/USD PER INCIDENT.
I know this, because we're still being defended by the FSF in a GPL case of our own. We've been taught more about the GPL and related case law than 90% of the fanboys on Slashdot will ever be exposed to. Its an amazingly powerful Swiss Army license that can easily take down most companies abusing it.
The important thing to note, which most of the replies in this story are missing, is that even when companies are found to be violating, and "fix" their problems with the code, they're STILL guilty of violating US copyright law, and that is still punishable by fines and court. Their infringement doesn't just "vanish" when they give the code back to the community, or agree to stop using it.
In some cases, a subponea of the company's other projects by an independent auditor to see that their other code isn't also infringing is requested. I found a company in Germany who incorporated pilot-link code into every single one of their core products. I could only check the "free" ones that I could download, but 5 out of ther 6 apps included it, so I assume #6 did as well.
GPL violations are AMAZINGLY common, but most people just ignore it, or are scared to persue it through the legal system. Almost all cases don't follow through to make sure the violating company pays for their infringement.
"The fact of the matter is, proofreading dialog boxes and checking for consistent menu options and whatnot is not all that fun. Linux development happens mostly through hobbyists, and they're going to spend their free time doing what they enjoy."
There's one subtle issue you almost touched upon here... we do all of our development in our spare time. Many of us have families, hobbies, and full-time day jobs. We also have to deal with writing code, proofing and testing code (sometimes on very foreign hardware or platforms to help solve a bug for a user), and many other things. I'd wager that 80% or more of Free Software development (note: Not Open Source development) is done by people who don't get paid for it.
But to catch up... when I'm doing something in my spare time, which is very precious to me, and someone comes along and tries to tell me how I should be spending my spare time, it no longer is fun or interesting. I'm just going to go work on something else instead.
Here is an exact conversation I had with one user about a year ago that exemplifies how pitiful the situation is, with greedy users expecting everything for nothing:
"Hi, your application would be really useful to me if you moved the menus to the bottom instead of the top."
"Oh, good idea. Please file that in our online incident tracker so we can keep track of it."
"I don't want to file it anywhere, I'm telling you about it now. Can't you just change it for me right now so I can test it?"
"I'm pretty busy testing bugs for users right now. You've got the source code, please feel free to send in a patch that includes the behavior you want and we'll take a look."
"You suck, screw your project, I'll find something else."
I don't like knowing that I'm supposed to be some sort of "Free Technical Support" guy for every John and Sally that comes along. Like I just sit around waiting for the feature requests to come in. Pfft.
I think I tried Enlightenment once, about 8 years ago on Linux. It scarred me.
I personally run Sawfish, and have for years now.
I don't see any difference between the two. Sorry about that.
The difference is that Enlightenment is all about wasteful eye-candy drivel, and Sawfish is about lean, mean, blindingly-fast power-user environment. They are polar opposites of each other. You can make Sawfish as eye-candy as you wish, up to and exceeding what Enlightement can do, but you can't trim Enlightenment down to be lean mean and fast, not without crippling its basic behavior (or gutting code and rebuilding it).
OSX is fine for many people, its just not for me and a few hundred of my closest friends. Regardless of polish or style, its disgustingly slow, painful to use, and reduces my productivity by exponential levels, because I'm forced to work in a way that is foreign to me.
Sure, I could relearn everything differently, just like I could switch my keyboard to using Dvorak to type. I could port all of my mail, documents, applications, etc. over... and I could spend the $2,000+ or more to get the right hardware, RAM, and third-party apps (Pages, iLife, etc.) to compete with what I get for free with Linux, but I don't have 6 months to reinvent myself, nor the cash to spend on it to try.
Linux does this for me today, and OSX doesn't... at least not yet.
"Perhaps I'm missing something, but the you already get an application specific context menu."
You are definately missing something...
I don't get any application-specific context menus when I'm right-clicking over an app's window, nor do I get any with right/left click, or ctrl/alt/cmd combined with right/left click, to interact with every feature of that application.
Yes, there is that incredibly irritating menubar at the top, which I can't remove, move, relocate, reconfigure, or change. That doesn't count.
"That way lies Enlightenment, and Enlightenment brings... suffering."
I think I tried Enlightenment once, about 8 years ago on Linux. It scarred me.
I personally run Sawfish, and have for years now. I love being able to remove window titles, frames, borders and icons. I love being able to script actions with lisp without bringing down the OS to affect those changes. My desktop resolution is 1800x1600, and I prefer 6pt fonts in most applications. I have plenty of desktop space to use for icons or menubars if I wanted to, but what's the point? Every application has its own right/left/alt/ctrl/whatever context menu (different menu based on what meta key, or lack of, that I use).
As for focus-follows-mouse, I prefer that way. I have a G3 running Tiger (mostly for pilot-link development), and while it has its place, I don't think I could EVER get used to the OSX UI or its clunky ways (not to mention it being pitifully slow).
There's far too much waste on the screen, enormous fonts, and that damn menubar at the top is the single largest irritation, especially with a large screen resolution. Too much mouse travel just to access an application's context menus. Wasteful.
I don't like the OS twisting my arm into working the way it thinks is best for me.
"Why would I do that when I can get consistency with choice by using Mac OS X?"
(emphasis mine)
Consistency with choice... by removing choice, yes.
OSX is the least configurable of the three major operating systems, and strongarms you into a very tight little box, forcing you to work how it wants you to, not how you're the most productive.
I'll give you some examples:
Show me how I can remove the menubar at the top of the GUI, and have an application-specific context menu for each application instead.
Show me how I can have a clean, iconless desktop
Show me how I can change the window frames and borders (so there are none)
Show me how to enable autoraise with a 400ms delay
Show me how I can set all menus and OS elements that display text to display it in a 7 point font with the antialiased face of my choosing.
Answer for all of the above: You can't..
This is a very small sample set, I can come up with dozens of others.
OSX is the bottom of the heap in speed and flexibility.
Don't get me wrong, what it does (deal with media; music, movies, video), it does amazingly well... but of course that's because it has funding. Put a few million dollars behind some of your favorite Linux projects and you'll see them blow away what OSX offers today.
"Compared to what I've got on OS X. See, I've got an open source kernel, and the ability to run all the open source X11 apps I want, PLUS commercial apps as well when I want them. Best of all worlds."
Fancy that, so do I... running Linux.
But with Linux, I get a lot more as part of he core OS:
Dozens of onboard scripting languages (Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, Java)
The ability to CUSTOMIZE THE WINDOWING ENVIRONMENT.
OSX absolutely sucks here (not to mention the OSX UI is disgustingly slow, even on their highest-end Powerbooks). I can't move/remove the menubar, I can't set autoraise, I can't disable icons and rely on context menus only, in short, I'm forced into their model of interacting with the OS. Heck, even Microsoft Windows lets you configure more of the core UI with included tools (without going to third-party configure tools).
The ability to install or build a kernel tailored to my environment, such as choosing my cryptographic level, implementing strong security policies, picking a VM that suits my machine's workloads, and so on. On OSX, you are stuck with what is provided for you + patch levels.
Package management tools that are decades ahead of what OSX provides, which is to say... nothing.
I can go on... but what's the point.
OSX has its niche ("media"), and other operating systems have their niche (Windows == games + office productivity), Linux == servers + desktops). OSX has millions upon millions of dollars dumped into development, and Linux for the most part is vendor-ignored, and barely funded.
You can't compare something heavily funded with custom hardware designed specifically for the task, with vendor cooperation and very specific goals driving the vision.. with something that has millions of distributed, disconnected developers working in their spare time, unfunded, with no vendor cooperation.
"1. Normal users simply don't care about any of this. Besides I can't think of a single user app on linux that is as slick as any one of the iLife apps. Until there is... forget about it."
Until there is as much funding piped into a single Linux application like there was into iLife (or any other OSX app shipped with the core OS), you're right... forget about it.
"(1) I do [insert] what profesional tools can I get for Linux?"
Talk to your vendor. There are plenty of them offering high-quality professional tools for Linux at a reasonable cost.
As for the "community" providing these "professional" quality tools for you, at no cost... good luck. Nobody works for free, especially if it isn't something they want to work on.
Try funding some development or kicking a few hundred thousand dollars into your favorite project and see how much it will improve.
Nope, with B64 from 6/19 and 2.3.0.2, with Distributed DB running (and thousands of lines of relevant successful log in that tab), it doesn't fetch a single byte of the distributed torrent file.
In my case, it sits there at "Downloading from..." (the magnet URI), for about an hour... never gets past it. Other torrents I'm pulling and seeding work fine.
"You jest, but Linux seriously needs forking, because too many stupid things happen that shouldn't. We need someone to try ABI compatibility, a bit of stability, a better block device layer, getting reiser4 working,.... Not all of these things would necessarily work, but some of them would, and while Linus is in control none of them happen."
Do you have a few thousand idle developers lined up to take over all of the drivers, interfaces and other source code? You'll have to fork all of the kernel maintainers' work as well, not just Linus'...
Don't expect that just because you "fork linux", that all of the current Linux authors will magically begin to support your forked version as well as the "real" Linux too. You better have a few hundred developers ready to start porting and backporting Linux fixes to your "forked" version.
"However, if you contribute to any GNU programs you have to assign copyright to the FSF. So it's not exactly unheard of, and doesn't make it non-free."
Except the part where you don't.
You only have to assign copyright (note, assign, not grant) to the FSF so they can defend you in the case of any litigation involving your code, such as a GPL (and hence, copyright) violation or other issues.
It is not a requirement of the license to do so, unlike the CDDL, which requires it.
Here's an example:
You take some OpenSolaris code, which is licensed under the CDDL, and you add your own functions to it, to add some new whizbang features. By license, you MUST give Sun full copyright to those changes you just made. You are now both hold co-copyright to the same code (a murkly legal area to defend).
Sun takes the code, changes the license on it, and sells it to Microsoft for their Unix Services group/software.
Microsoft releases the code under their own license, proprietary, and you notice your code running in their Unix Services packages.
What do you do? What if they see YOU releasing a "competing" product based on the same exact code that you gave Sun fully copyright to? Does Sun defend you in a lawsuit? Not likely.
Its best to stay away from it, its very shady and almost impossible to defend legally. Think of it like public domain code basically... anything you write, you can keep under CDDL, but once you give Sun full rights to the code, all bets are off, including suing their partners for using it without a legitimate license.
"I think that IBM should try its damnedest to put out a dual processor Power5 system for $1000, you supply the disks. Saturate the market, and offer two-tier service, ie. No service or IBM service."
What if they did? What if you could get a dual G5 PPC machine with say... 512M RAM and a decent disk (I have no idea whats "decent" these days... 160G?), for $1,500 ballpark? Would you buy one? Would your friends?
I know my wife would kill me if I brought another machine home, but a Dual G5 could replace my ageing G3 for development in a heartbeat... AND it can run OSX, Linux, and BSD natively. I'd love to keep working on porting stuff from my various projects over to something that fast...
I just checked and Apple's "Developer Transition Kit" costs $999.00, and $500 for your ADC Select membership ($3,500 for Premiere), and you have to give the hardware back in a year. Its a lease, so you can get your apps working in Universal Binary format on Day 1 and not Day 100.
So let's dream for a moment...
Dual G5, $1,500
PowerPC-based
You get to keep it
It runs 3 operating systems
Apple Developer Transition Kit, $1,499 or $4,499
Intel-based
You have to return it in 12 months
You have to buy another machine anyway to replace it
Is it worth it? Maybe we can keep putting pressure on IBM or their partners to get something like this out there... They can't just throw their whole fab into the dumpster out back, can they?
"Has anyone found something really interesting in the code, now that Solaris is open?"
Unfortunately, I can't. As a Open Source/Free Software author, the CDDL specifically prohibits me from learning anything from looking at the OpenSolaris code.
Because its covered by a "file-based" license, I can either take files in full, or not at all. I am not covered by the CDDL (and would be in violation of it) by taking snippets of code from any of the files, including viewing them and "paraphrasing" what I learn back into my own code.
Also, there ARE patented concepts in the OpenSolaris code, which you are welcome to use, as long as you use entire files (i.e. covered by the "file-based" license). I don't want to put any of my clients or projects at risk, so I can't look at the code.
So nope, I haven't even looked at the code, because frankly, I can't, without contaminating my own code and ideas.
"Linux is a lot easier to handle than it was years ago, but it still has some fundamental issues."
Until the "fundamental issues" are:
Funded, or
A nuisance, or
Stopping applications from functioning, or
Interesting to fix/work on, or
Reported in useful detail
...don't expect any fixes any time soon. Developers (like myself) work on things that are interesting and fun, IN OUR SPARE TIME. Many of us have day jobs and families and hobbies, and that time is very limited.
I hear all the time how Project Fu sucks because it has a bug here or is lacking a feature there, and when I ask if the bug/feature was reported, I get silence.
When I ask if the developer was paid to fix the bug (i.e. raise it in his priority), I get silence.
The reason Linux has "fundamental issues" lies solely OUTSIDE the responsibilities of the developers working on it. It is either a vendor problem (i.e. no docs, refusal to provide docs, or threats of lawsuits), or the users (refusing to provide bug reports, testing, or details, or refusal to fund non-essential features).
When someone tells me what I should be doing in MY SPARE TIME, I just go find something else to do.
"Time lost to unexpected problems when installing Linux on diverse hardware or when installing new software also translates into cost for many people."
He/she was comparing installing Linux on random, "diverse" hardware (which may or may not work together at all with ANY operating system), with installing OSX on a known subset of hardware, which OSX IS known to work on.
Its no wonder Linux takes more time to configure on "diverse" hardware than OSX on hardware that was designed with the exact target operating system in mind.
"About the only thing it cannot do is run on diverse motherboards/CPUs but there is nothing wrong with peripheral support. Stop spreading the FUD already."
Thank you for proving my point exactly. Well done.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen this quite a few times with companies known or accused of violating the GPL (Sony was one I actively persued for this exact issue). They claimed they were going to release the source "after they cleaned it up a bit", but they had binaries out there already built with that "unclean" source.
The problem is, "cleaned-up source" builds a different binary, and THAT binary has to be released as well. Its not good enough.
Sony tried to skirt around the issue by releasing v2.0 binaries, and then at the same time, releasing v1.0 sources, so you could never get the source to the binaries already available, until 3.0 came out. You were always kept one release behind current, with the source. Presumably this was to "slow you down". Bastards.
...and pay the fines for their existing violations levied by the court, of course.
If I kill someone and apologize to the family for my crimes, and promise never to kill again... am I set free? No.
The same applies here, and I'm firm when I state that companies should NOT get away with this, and EVERY company found to be violating copyright, needs to be publically stated, viewed, and seen by the public at large for what they've done.
It should HURT their bottom line, their core business, to be publically put on the towne square in the stockade as a license violator.
This is actually called a "Lanham Act" violation ("...false designation of origin").
On top of that, basically its a GPL violation, which removed their right to continue to distribute or sell that software, and EVERY SINGLE SALE or DOWNLOAD is now a separate copyright violation, punishable by $20,000/USD to $200,000/USD PER INCIDENT.
I know this, because we're still being defended by the FSF in a GPL case of our own. We've been taught more about the GPL and related case law than 90% of the fanboys on Slashdot will ever be exposed to. Its an amazingly powerful Swiss Army license that can easily take down most companies abusing it.
The important thing to note, which most of the replies in this story are missing, is that even when companies are found to be violating, and "fix" their problems with the code, they're STILL guilty of violating US copyright law, and that is still punishable by fines and court. Their infringement doesn't just "vanish" when they give the code back to the community, or agree to stop using it.
In some cases, a subponea of the company's other projects by an independent auditor to see that their other code isn't also infringing is requested. I found a company in Germany who incorporated pilot-link code into every single one of their core products. I could only check the "free" ones that I could download, but 5 out of ther 6 apps included it, so I assume #6 did as well.
GPL violations are AMAZINGLY common, but most people just ignore it, or are scared to persue it through the legal system. Almost all cases don't follow through to make sure the violating company pays for their infringement.
There's one subtle issue you almost touched upon here... we do all of our development in our spare time. Many of us have families, hobbies, and full-time day jobs. We also have to deal with writing code, proofing and testing code (sometimes on very foreign hardware or platforms to help solve a bug for a user), and many other things. I'd wager that 80% or more of Free Software development (note: Not Open Source development) is done by people who don't get paid for it.
HOWTO Pay for Free Software is a great treatise on the matter.
But to catch up... when I'm doing something in my spare time, which is very precious to me, and someone comes along and tries to tell me how I should be spending my spare time, it no longer is fun or interesting. I'm just going to go work on something else instead.
Here is an exact conversation I had with one user about a year ago that exemplifies how pitiful the situation is, with greedy users expecting everything for nothing:
I don't like knowing that I'm supposed to be some sort of "Free Technical Support" guy for every John and Sally that comes along. Like I just sit around waiting for the feature requests to come in. Pfft.
The difference is that Enlightenment is all about wasteful eye-candy drivel, and Sawfish is about lean, mean, blindingly-fast power-user environment. They are polar opposites of each other. You can make Sawfish as eye-candy as you wish, up to and exceeding what Enlightement can do, but you can't trim Enlightenment down to be lean mean and fast, not without crippling its basic behavior (or gutting code and rebuilding it).
OSX is fine for many people, its just not for me and a few hundred of my closest friends. Regardless of polish or style, its disgustingly slow, painful to use, and reduces my productivity by exponential levels, because I'm forced to work in a way that is foreign to me.
Sure, I could relearn everything differently, just like I could switch my keyboard to using Dvorak to type. I could port all of my mail, documents, applications, etc. over... and I could spend the $2,000+ or more to get the right hardware, RAM, and third-party apps (Pages, iLife, etc.) to compete with what I get for free with Linux, but I don't have 6 months to reinvent myself, nor the cash to spend on it to try.
Linux does this for me today, and OSX doesn't... at least not yet.
You are definately missing something...
I don't get any application-specific context menus when I'm right-clicking over an app's window, nor do I get any with right/left click, or ctrl/alt/cmd combined with right/left click, to interact with every feature of that application.
Yes, there is that incredibly irritating menubar at the top, which I can't remove, move, relocate, reconfigure, or change. That doesn't count.
I think I tried Enlightenment once, about 8 years ago on Linux. It scarred me.
I personally run Sawfish, and have for years now. I love being able to remove window titles, frames, borders and icons. I love being able to script actions with lisp without bringing down the OS to affect those changes. My desktop resolution is 1800x1600, and I prefer 6pt fonts in most applications. I have plenty of desktop space to use for icons or menubars if I wanted to, but what's the point? Every application has its own right/left/alt/ctrl/whatever context menu (different menu based on what meta key, or lack of, that I use).
As for focus-follows-mouse, I prefer that way. I have a G3 running Tiger (mostly for pilot-link development), and while it has its place, I don't think I could EVER get used to the OSX UI or its clunky ways (not to mention it being pitifully slow).
There's far too much waste on the screen, enormous fonts, and that damn menubar at the top is the single largest irritation, especially with a large screen resolution. Too much mouse travel just to access an application's context menus. Wasteful.
I don't like the OS twisting my arm into working the way it thinks is best for me.
(emphasis mine)
Consistency with choice... by removing choice, yes.
OSX is the least configurable of the three major operating systems, and strongarms you into a very tight little box, forcing you to work how it wants you to, not how you're the most productive.
I'll give you some examples:
Answer for all of the above: You can't..
This is a very small sample set, I can come up with dozens of others.
OSX is the bottom of the heap in speed and flexibility.
Don't get me wrong, what it does (deal with media; music, movies, video), it does amazingly well... but of course that's because it has funding. Put a few million dollars behind some of your favorite Linux projects and you'll see them blow away what OSX offers today.
Fancy that, so do I... running Linux.
But with Linux, I get a lot more as part of he core OS:
OSX absolutely sucks here (not to mention the OSX UI is disgustingly slow, even on their highest-end Powerbooks). I can't move/remove the menubar, I can't set autoraise, I can't disable icons and rely on context menus only, in short, I'm forced into their model of interacting with the OS. Heck, even Microsoft Windows lets you configure more of the core UI with included tools (without going to third-party configure tools).
I can go on... but what's the point.
OSX has its niche ("media"), and other operating systems have their niche (Windows == games + office productivity), Linux == servers + desktops). OSX has millions upon millions of dollars dumped into development, and Linux for the most part is vendor-ignored, and barely funded.
You can't compare something heavily funded with custom hardware designed specifically for the task, with vendor cooperation and very specific goals driving the vision.. with something that has millions of distributed, disconnected developers working in their spare time, unfunded, with no vendor cooperation.
Until there is as much funding piped into a single Linux application like there was into iLife (or any other OSX app shipped with the core OS), you're right... forget about it.
Unfunded hardware development vs. Funded hardware development. You're right, no comparison.
No, you've missed the point. Let's compare:
Versus one example on Debian with standard included tools:
Talk to your vendor. There are plenty of them offering high-quality professional tools for Linux at a reasonable cost.
As for the "community" providing these "professional" quality tools for you, at no cost... good luck. Nobody works for free, especially if it isn't something they want to work on.
Try funding some development or kicking a few hundred thousand dollars into your favorite project and see how much it will improve.
Good, because Linux wasn't designed to satisfy the needs of 99% of the computing population.
Nope, with B64 from 6/19 and 2.3.0.2, with Distributed DB running (and thousands of lines of relevant successful log in that tab), it doesn't fetch a single byte of the distributed torrent file.
In my case, it sits there at "Downloading from..." (the magnet URI), for about an hour... never gets past it. Other torrents I'm pulling and seeding work fine.
Nope, doesn't work for me either, using B64 from June 19th's snapshot...
Do you have a few thousand idle developers lined up to take over all of the drivers, interfaces and other source code? You'll have to fork all of the kernel maintainers' work as well, not just Linus'...
Don't expect that just because you "fork linux", that all of the current Linux authors will magically begin to support your forked version as well as the "real" Linux too. You better have a few hundred developers ready to start porting and backporting Linux fixes to your "forked" version.
Not likely, because Debian people care about Free Software and freedom in general, and they actually read licenses.
Except the part where you don't.
You only have to assign copyright (note, assign, not grant) to the FSF so they can defend you in the case of any litigation involving your code, such as a GPL (and hence, copyright) violation or other issues.
It is not a requirement of the license to do so, unlike the CDDL, which requires it.
Here's an example:
What do you do? What if they see YOU releasing a "competing" product based on the same exact code that you gave Sun fully copyright to? Does Sun defend you in a lawsuit? Not likely.
Its best to stay away from it, its very shady and almost impossible to defend legally. Think of it like public domain code basically... anything you write, you can keep under CDDL, but once you give Sun full rights to the code, all bets are off, including suing their partners for using it without a legitimate license.
What if they did? What if you could get a dual G5 PPC machine with say... 512M RAM and a decent disk (I have no idea whats "decent" these days... 160G?), for $1,500 ballpark? Would you buy one? Would your friends?
I know my wife would kill me if I brought another machine home, but a Dual G5 could replace my ageing G3 for development in a heartbeat... AND it can run OSX, Linux, and BSD natively. I'd love to keep working on porting stuff from my various projects over to something that fast...
I just checked and Apple's "Developer Transition Kit" costs $999.00, and $500 for your ADC Select membership ($3,500 for Premiere), and you have to give the hardware back in a year. Its a lease, so you can get your apps working in Universal Binary format on Day 1 and not Day 100.
So let's dream for a moment...
Is it worth it? Maybe we can keep putting pressure on IBM or their partners to get something like this out there... They can't just throw their whole fab into the dumpster out back, can they?
As I'm sure you've been told already, prefetching DOES NOT fetch hrefs, it fetches
tags, when specified. I'd wager that less than 5% of all web designers are actively using these.Gee, what word does that remind you of?
Unfortunately, I can't. As a Open Source/Free Software author, the CDDL specifically prohibits me from learning anything from looking at the OpenSolaris code.
Because its covered by a "file-based" license, I can either take files in full, or not at all. I am not covered by the CDDL (and would be in violation of it) by taking snippets of code from any of the files, including viewing them and "paraphrasing" what I learn back into my own code.
Also, there ARE patented concepts in the OpenSolaris code, which you are welcome to use, as long as you use entire files (i.e. covered by the "file-based" license). I don't want to put any of my clients or projects at risk, so I can't look at the code.
So nope, I haven't even looked at the code, because frankly, I can't, without contaminating my own code and ideas.
Until the "fundamental issues" are:
...don't expect any fixes any time soon. Developers (like myself) work on things that are interesting and fun, IN OUR SPARE TIME. Many of us have day jobs and families and hobbies, and that time is very limited.
I hear all the time how Project Fu sucks because it has a bug here or is lacking a feature there, and when I ask if the bug/feature was reported, I get silence.
When I ask if the developer was paid to fix the bug (i.e. raise it in his priority), I get silence.
The reason Linux has "fundamental issues" lies solely OUTSIDE the responsibilities of the developers working on it. It is either a vendor problem (i.e. no docs, refusal to provide docs, or threats of lawsuits), or the users (refusing to provide bug reports, testing, or details, or refusal to fund non-essential features).
When someone tells me what I should be doing in MY SPARE TIME, I just go find something else to do.
Read the original post I quoted:
He/she was comparing installing Linux on random, "diverse" hardware (which may or may not work together at all with ANY operating system), with installing OSX on a known subset of hardware, which OSX IS known to work on.
Its no wonder Linux takes more time to configure on "diverse" hardware than OSX on hardware that was designed with the exact target operating system in mind.
Thank you for proving my point exactly. Well done.