It varies. There was a cable monopoly in the section of Houston where I used to live. I believe there is a cable monopoly in the section of Indiana where I live now, though as I don't get cable TV ATM I could be wrong there. And in the former case, this wasn't just a natural, "there was only one provider" monopoly. It was an honest-to-goodness local-government mandated monopoly. At some point before I moved there Warner came in and said "We'll come in and run cable TV to people's houses if you agree to never again let anyone else do the same thing." and the local city council said "OK".
I believe what the grandparent post should have said was "Cable companies are often given a local monopoly over consumers."
This may just be my impression, but I think that this can largely be chalked up to one thing.
Normally, patent stories are news because they are unreasonable. The patent section is generally used as sort of an activist central to highlight abuse with the faulty U.S. patent system.
In this case, however, the story is news because Apple is doing it. They weren't posting it specifically becuase they found it actively unreasonable; they were posting it becuase Apple were the ones who filed it, and the filing concerned a newsworthy piece of technology, and the filing could have impact on other technology-- for example, the pPod software.
As a result: normally the patent stories, everyone's intial reaction-- and thus the tone set for the discussion is-- "Oh, that's absurd". In this particular case, however, one's initial reaction is: "Oh".
I suspect that if Slashdot were to run a story tomorrow along the lines of "DaimerCrysler tries to patent new lock-reducing wheel drive shaft flange configuration" we'd see a lot of "Oh" reactions as well.
Some time ago on Slashdot the possibility of a "geek PAC" was discussed.
This is a quesiton somewhat along the same lines. Essentially:
Exactly how much money would it require to do whatever necessary to* remove Mr. Orrin Hatch from a position of legislative power in the United States government?
I think you could find a variety of private citizens, from a number of corners, who would be ecstatic to donate to such a cause, due to the probable benefit it would have in terms of protecting the civil rights, artistic expression, and technological progress of this nation. Slashdotters annoyed at his attempts to introduce increasingly violent anti-file-sharing bills are just the tip of the iceberg.
Could it be that these two parties have 'chosen' values which actually do manage to accurately represent the values of a majority of the people in this country?
Please explain to me, how are "it is wrong with the U.S. nonconsensually imposes its will on foreign nations" and "it is wrong when the WTO nonconsensually imposes its will on foreign nations" contradictory statements?
With the Xbox tossoff, by "the product" I was referring to the entire venture as a whole. The platform, as it were. Regardless of selling the consoles at a loss, Nintendo and Sony make up for that loss in other ways. Microsoft does not. Nintendo and Sony consoles operate under a business model where you take a loss in one area in order to get profits in another. The XBox does not have a business model. If Microsoft's business plan is to make some losses now in order to get into a position where they can make back that money later, they are doing an awful job of it. Once they move the XBox line into profitability, at this point they will have to make literally billions of dollars in order to break even in the long term aggregate. Microsoft H&E does not seem to be consistently moving toward profitability with their current strategy and has not yet shown indication that their future strategy will be significantly different enough to change this.
I would argue that Microsoft is not concerned with the profitability of the XBox either now or in the long term aggregate. I would argue that what they are concerned with is (1) having influence on the games market in the event that in the future, device convergance causes set-top or "video game" boxes to mutate into platforms capable of competing with the PC market Microsoft currently controls and (2) trying to maximize consumer lock-in to the DirectX platform by trying to reduce the extent to which dedicated game console platforms allow the existence of game developers in no way beholden to Microsoft or its technologies or platforms.
My point in the original post by my passing reference to the XBox was that in Microsoft's case, market power can often be a more important goal than profit. Thus they are a special case where instead of operating costs being only a determining factor in deciding whether to continue a product, operating costs are not a factor at all. This is just my analysis, however, and it is by no means a certainty, so including the XBox tossoff probably detracted from my argument in the parent post. Ah well.
You bring up very good points however it does increase overhead and support costs if ever so slightly.
Sure. Except there are two things.
Increased costs don't translate to higher prices. Businesses don't just go "oh gee, our heating bill was $70 higher this month than we were expecting, better raise our prices by 0.03 cents per unit". Businesses sell at the price that will maximize the value of the price per unit times the number of consumers willing to buy at the current price per unit. Cost only comes in in that if that value winds up being less than the expected overall cost of producing the product over time, the product is discontinued. unless the company is Microsoft.
Now given, since Microsoft can set their own prices, it's quite likely MS would purposefully increase costs in the EU after this even if it lowers their demand to "punish" the EU, or so that they can whine "oh look, enforcing antitrust laws just leads to higher demand". But the fact such things are possible seems to me like an argument for MORE action against MS's monopoly, not less.
Such costs would be nearly incidental. Like I said, the increased support and overhead costs would be absolutely dwarfed by, say, the amount of money put into Windows Media Player with no expectation on return, or the amount of money put into the XBox with no expectation on return in the last week*. It probably would not even be as large a cost as, say, a $613M fine. I don't see anyone going "Paying $613M to the EU will result in higher costs for Microsoft, resulting in higher prices to consumers".
* Caveat: This may not be a fair statement. I'm sure MS firmly expects the XBox 5 to make a small profit.
As regards interoperability, Microsoft is required, within 120 days, to disclose complete and accurate interface documentation which would allow non-Microsoft work group servers to achieve full interoperability with Windows PCs and servers. This will enable rival vendors to develop products that can compete on a level playing field in the work group server operating system market. The disclosed information will have to be updated each time Microsoft brings to the market new versions of its relevant products.
Nice. This isn't the Holy Grail that would allow for full Wine compatibility, but this should do absolutely wonderful things for Samba...
in a front-page article a couple days ago that it has not yet been decided whether the remedy will be put on hold during the appeal and MS has to lose the appeal for the remedy to go into effect, or whether the remedy goes into effect now and MS has to win the appeal for the remedy to be redacted.
They said a judge had a forthcoming ruling on that issue. It seems quite possible to me the ruling would go in favor of the government, since it is quite clear that a remedy that begins in five years would be as good as no remedy at all-- it is quite easy to look at how quickly the tech market moves and how quickly MS has been able to take over previous previous tech markets once they start putting the veritcal-monopoly moves on, and argue that if the remedy waits for the end of the appeals process, it will be too late to do anything to help the competitors the remedy is meant to address.
Whether this has changed since then I do not know.
This sounds like the most important part to me. What does this mean? The CNN article is incredibly vague. Is MS allowed to place restrictions on the licensing of this "program code"-- i.e. forcing anyone who looks at code to sign an NDA saying, say, they won't use the information in a GPLed product? What do they define by "in the server market"? Is this just saying MS has to make its WMA code available, or is this Windows in general?
If the latter, that's absolutely fantastic. That means we could start seeing 100% compatible versions of Wine, freed from the difficulty and endless trial=and-error of duplicating an API where so much is undocumented and "bug compatibility" is so crucial.
If the former, that this means MS has to divulge the necessary information for third parties to be fully compatible with WMP serving, that's not quite so interesting.
Incidentally, I want to nominate this as the most bullshit argument MS apologists have ever put forth, ever.
Analysts say by forcing Microsoft to offer a version of Windows XP without Media Player, consumers could pay higher costs.
"If it were to be obliged to offer versions both with and without Media Player, then that would mean we would probably have double the number of consumer PC configuration in our shops. Of course this is product that is built before it is sold," says Brian Gammage from computer consultancy Gartner.
Wow. So Microsoft using Windows revenues to subsidize a hugely complex and unnecessary movie player and set of movie codecs doesn't increase costs to consumers, but Microsoft having to print up two differing sets of cheap cardboard to sell in stores does. Amazing.
While I've never managed to find a hard cite for this, it was widely reported that during the original Code Red outbreak, the windows update page was showing "hacked by Chinese Worm".
Let's ignore for a moment the obvious consequences if these reports were true-- that one, the windows update server was for some time susceptable to the idx exploit before Code Red happened to find it by chance, and two, it's possible someone else could have discovered this before code red did, and three, if this happened we would never have known.
If one takes a bit of liberty in applying logic, this seems to imply some rather horrible things. Windows Update is, roughly speaking, the single network facility Microsoft has that it is most important is not compromised; the Code Red worm was roughly the easiest sort of compromise to protect oneself against. Yet it happened. Given Microsoft is under no obligation to disclose internally-discovered breakins, what does this imply about the frequency of more subtle, targeted attacks on lower-profile targets within Microsoft?
Remember to take into account that unlike, say, the GNOME developers-- a disparate, largely disconnected group spread across the world-- Microsoft is a singular network, and thus it is possible that compromising a very low-profile target within the Microsoft internal network is likely to make it vastly easier, both from a technical and a social-engineering standpoint, to have effect on more important targets within the network...
Looking back at history I'm thinking about Rockefeller and Standard oil. How is that situation any different from Gates and Microsoft?
The only difference is that in 2000, when the Microsoft case was in the sentencing phase, George W. Bush became president and ordered the case effectively dropped; and in 1911 William H. Taft was president, and he let the Standard Oil case go through.
The way it looked to me they weren't suing them, just asking for a declaratory judgement. I guess it's a kind of lawsuit, but it looked more like HardOCP just telling a judge "These people keep threatening to sue us and it's creating uncertainty. Could you just just decide, let's pretend they'd sued us over the stuff they're threatening to sue over, hypothetically then who would win?". I don't know. i don't really understand it.
I think HardOCP made it pretty clear last time that they stand by their reporting. If Infinium wants to keep making threats they're going to keep getting ignored.
I know there's nothing but wannabe pretend-experts on slashdot, but I'm going to ask this anyway, on the offchance maybe there happen to be some wannabe pretend-experts who mostly post on Groklaw who wandered in by accident. I've been wondering for awhile:
From a legal standpoint, exactly how far and how often can you move toward *threatening* a lawsuit before it becomes illegal to not actually declare one?
Han always came across to me as shooting in self defense in the first movie. Among other things, he was facing a BOUNTY HUNTER. Do you NEED to let them shoot first to know what a bounty hunter for jabba the hutt is going to do to you?
The restoration doesn't clarify he was shooting in self defense. The restoration just implies Han was either so monumentally nice or so monumentally stupid that he couldn't see where this was going and wouldn't shoot to save his own skin unless the other person shot first.
What I can't stand about that change is that what the restoration ultimately means is that Han did not survive that scene because of quick thinking and reflexes and the cunning to have a gun already hidden. It means that Han survived the scene solely because Greedo missed.
In addition to the fact EV1Servers is supporting SCO, it has just been neatly demonstrated EV1Servers is incapable of standing up to a slashdotting.
Not exactly a positive indicator of their abilities as a hosting provider, is it ^_^
Re:So they stick to the new license...
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right? Does the GPL mean whatever the FSF decides it means that week?
Well, the FSF did a very good job of backing up their claim that it is incompatible with the GPL. They pointed to the exact sections where the incompatibility occurs. Most people, including a number of the major Linux distributions, seem to agree with the FSF on this interpretation.
The "this week" comment is misleading. The FSF has never changed their opinion on the correct interpretation of the GPL and has tried to make the implications of this interpretation as clear as possible from day one.
More importantly, what exactly is the FSF supposed to do about people who don't agree with their current take and make use of Apache/XFree86-4.4 anyway? Are they going to sue them?
If someone alters a GPL program such that the code is linked with code from an incompatible license, the copyright holder of that code is within their rights to order the distributor of the mixed code to stop. If that distributor does not stop, the copyright holder is within their rights to sue the distributor to make them stop.
If the FSF were the copyright holder, they probably would sue if they absolutely had to in order to ensure compliance with the GPL. The FSF does hold the copyright on many open source projects, so this is a possibility.
Do they have the money, let alone the ability convince a court that the suit isn't frivilous?
Actually, yes, the main function of the FSF is to serve as a central copyright repository for open source and trust fund for the legal defense of those copyrights.
More importantly, can they afford the ill will that would result?
Can the open source software community afford to exist in a manner in which licenses are addressed in a slapdash, "oh that's close enough" manner? Since the nature of Open Source is to coordinate input from many contributors, the exact manner in which the rights and licensing to that input is marshalled is of extreme importance. The rights framework for open source needs to be clear and solid.
Moreover, I'm not sure exactly how much ill will the FSF would garner for enforcing the requirement that if you redistribute GPLed code you follow the terms of the GPL, especially since, well, if the GPL isn't going to be complied with then why does it exist in the first place? The only ill will this would generate is among people who don't think anything should be GPLed ever, and they hate the FSF anyway, so what's the loss?
Hey, er, I'm a longtime C programmer, starting a cross platform project in C++. Our goal is to use borland C++ builder 6 on MS 'DoH, and g++ on linux. I've been reading Bjarne, and he seems to think that most STL imps these days are pretty good. Is he smoking crack?
They've gotten better. However, this is only a very very recent development.
My plan for xplat compat is to test every day on both platforms so incompats don't creep in.
Slashdot Mirror
All they ask is that someone give them a first-class GUI toolkit at no cost, and with no strings attached! Is that so much to ask?
Sounds reasonable to me.
No, they are not.
It varies. There was a cable monopoly in the section of Houston where I used to live. I believe there is a cable monopoly in the section of Indiana where I live now, though as I don't get cable TV ATM I could be wrong there. And in the former case, this wasn't just a natural, "there was only one provider" monopoly. It was an honest-to-goodness local-government mandated monopoly. At some point before I moved there Warner came in and said "We'll come in and run cable TV to people's houses if you agree to never again let anyone else do the same thing." and the local city council said "OK".
I believe what the grandparent post should have said was "Cable companies are often given a local monopoly over consumers."
This may just be my impression, but I think that this can largely be chalked up to one thing.
Normally, patent stories are news because they are unreasonable. The patent section is generally used as sort of an activist central to highlight abuse with the faulty U.S. patent system.
In this case, however, the story is news because Apple is doing it. They weren't posting it specifically becuase they found it actively unreasonable; they were posting it becuase Apple were the ones who filed it, and the filing concerned a newsworthy piece of technology, and the filing could have impact on other technology-- for example, the pPod software.
As a result: normally the patent stories, everyone's intial reaction-- and thus the tone set for the discussion is-- "Oh, that's absurd". In this particular case, however, one's initial reaction is: "Oh".
I suspect that if Slashdot were to run a story tomorrow along the lines of "DaimerCrysler tries to patent new lock-reducing wheel drive shaft flange configuration" we'd see a lot of "Oh" reactions as well.
Out of curiousity.
Some time ago on Slashdot the possibility of a "geek PAC" was discussed.
This is a quesiton somewhat along the same lines. Essentially:
Exactly how much money would it require to do whatever necessary to* remove Mr. Orrin Hatch from a position of legislative power in the United States government?
I think you could find a variety of private citizens, from a number of corners, who would be ecstatic to donate to such a cause, due to the probable benefit it would have in terms of protecting the civil rights, artistic expression, and technological progress of this nation. Slashdotters annoyed at his attempts to introduce increasingly violent anti-file-sharing bills are just the tip of the iceberg.
* legally
Could it be that these two parties have 'chosen' values which actually do manage to accurately represent the values of a majority of the people in this country?
I don't see why it would. The majority of the people in the country don't vote.
Please explain to me, how are "it is wrong with the U.S. nonconsensually imposes its will on foreign nations" and "it is wrong when the WTO nonconsensually imposes its will on foreign nations" contradictory statements?
I cannot say I see where the hypocrisy comes in.
I guess the question here is who is more important to you, your customers or your legal department.
With the Xbox tossoff, by "the product" I was referring to the entire venture as a whole. The platform, as it were. Regardless of selling the consoles at a loss, Nintendo and Sony make up for that loss in other ways. Microsoft does not. Nintendo and Sony consoles operate under a business model where you take a loss in one area in order to get profits in another. The XBox does not have a business model. If Microsoft's business plan is to make some losses now in order to get into a position where they can make back that money later, they are doing an awful job of it. Once they move the XBox line into profitability, at this point they will have to make literally billions of dollars in order to break even in the long term aggregate. Microsoft H&E does not seem to be consistently moving toward profitability with their current strategy and has not yet shown indication that their future strategy will be significantly different enough to change this.
I would argue that Microsoft is not concerned with the profitability of the XBox either now or in the long term aggregate. I would argue that what they are concerned with is (1) having influence on the games market in the event that in the future, device convergance causes set-top or "video game" boxes to mutate into platforms capable of competing with the PC market Microsoft currently controls and (2) trying to maximize consumer lock-in to the DirectX platform by trying to reduce the extent to which dedicated game console platforms allow the existence of game developers in no way beholden to Microsoft or its technologies or platforms.
My point in the original post by my passing reference to the XBox was that in Microsoft's case, market power can often be a more important goal than profit. Thus they are a special case where instead of operating costs being only a determining factor in deciding whether to continue a product, operating costs are not a factor at all. This is just my analysis, however, and it is by no means a certainty, so including the XBox tossoff probably detracted from my argument in the parent post. Ah well.
Sure. Except there are two things.
- Increased costs don't translate to higher prices. Businesses don't just go "oh gee, our heating bill was $70 higher this month than we were expecting, better raise our prices by 0.03 cents per unit". Businesses sell at the price that will maximize the value of the price per unit times the number of consumers willing to buy at the current price per unit. Cost only comes in in that if that value winds up being less than the expected overall cost of producing the product over time, the product is discontinued. unless the company is Microsoft.
- Such costs would be nearly incidental. Like I said, the increased support and overhead costs would be absolutely dwarfed by, say, the amount of money put into Windows Media Player with no expectation on return, or the amount of money put into the XBox with no expectation on return in the last week*. It probably would not even be as large a cost as, say, a $613M fine. I don't see anyone going "Paying $613M to the EU will result in higher costs for Microsoft, resulting in higher prices to consumers".
* Caveat: This may not be a fair statement. I'm sure MS firmly expects the XBox 5 to make a small profit.Now given, since Microsoft can set their own prices, it's quite likely MS would purposefully increase costs in the EU after this even if it lowers their demand to "punish" the EU, or so that they can whine "oh look, enforcing antitrust laws just leads to higher demand". But the fact such things are possible seems to me like an argument for MORE action against MS's monopoly, not less.
As regards interoperability, Microsoft is required, within 120 days, to disclose complete and accurate interface documentation which would allow non-Microsoft work group servers to achieve full interoperability with Windows PCs and servers. This will enable rival vendors to develop products that can compete on a level playing field in the work group server operating system market. The disclosed information will have to be updated each time Microsoft brings to the market new versions of its relevant products.
Nice. This isn't the Holy Grail that would allow for full Wine compatibility, but this should do absolutely wonderful things for Samba...
in a front-page article a couple days ago that it has not yet been decided whether the remedy will be put on hold during the appeal and MS has to lose the appeal for the remedy to go into effect, or whether the remedy goes into effect now and MS has to win the appeal for the remedy to be redacted.
They said a judge had a forthcoming ruling on that issue. It seems quite possible to me the ruling would go in favor of the government, since it is quite clear that a remedy that begins in five years would be as good as no remedy at all-- it is quite easy to look at how quickly the tech market moves and how quickly MS has been able to take over previous previous tech markets once they start putting the veritcal-monopoly moves on, and argue that if the remedy waits for the end of the appeals process, it will be too late to do anything to help the competitors the remedy is meant to address.
Whether this has changed since then I do not know.
This sounds like the most important part to me. What does this mean? The CNN article is incredibly vague. Is MS allowed to place restrictions on the licensing of this "program code"-- i.e. forcing anyone who looks at code to sign an NDA saying, say, they won't use the information in a GPLed product? What do they define by "in the server market"? Is this just saying MS has to make its WMA code available, or is this Windows in general?
If the latter, that's absolutely fantastic. That means we could start seeing 100% compatible versions of Wine, freed from the difficulty and endless trial=and-error of duplicating an API where so much is undocumented and "bug compatibility" is so crucial.
If the former, that this means MS has to divulge the necessary information for third parties to be fully compatible with WMP serving, that's not quite so interesting.
Incidentally, I want to nominate this as the most bullshit argument MS apologists have ever put forth, ever.
Analysts say by forcing Microsoft to offer a version of Windows XP without Media Player, consumers could pay higher costs.
"If it were to be obliged to offer versions both with and without Media Player, then that would mean we would probably have double the number of consumer PC configuration in our shops. Of course this is product that is built before it is sold," says Brian Gammage from computer consultancy Gartner.
Wow. So Microsoft using Windows revenues to subsidize a hugely complex and unnecessary movie player and set of movie codecs doesn't increase costs to consumers, but Microsoft having to print up two differing sets of cheap cardboard to sell in stores does. Amazing.
While I've never managed to find a hard cite for this, it was widely reported that during the original Code Red outbreak, the windows update page was showing "hacked by Chinese Worm".
Let's ignore for a moment the obvious consequences if these reports were true-- that one, the windows update server was for some time susceptable to the idx exploit before Code Red happened to find it by chance, and two, it's possible someone else could have discovered this before code red did, and three, if this happened we would never have known.
If one takes a bit of liberty in applying logic, this seems to imply some rather horrible things. Windows Update is, roughly speaking, the single network facility Microsoft has that it is most important is not compromised; the Code Red worm was roughly the easiest sort of compromise to protect oneself against. Yet it happened. Given Microsoft is under no obligation to disclose internally-discovered breakins, what does this imply about the frequency of more subtle, targeted attacks on lower-profile targets within Microsoft?
Remember to take into account that unlike, say, the GNOME developers-- a disparate, largely disconnected group spread across the world-- Microsoft is a singular network, and thus it is possible that compromising a very low-profile target within the Microsoft internal network is likely to make it vastly easier, both from a technical and a social-engineering standpoint, to have effect on more important targets within the network...
Just a thought.
"Do You Like Worms", by the Beach Boys
Looking back at history I'm thinking about Rockefeller and Standard oil. How is that situation any different from Gates and Microsoft?
The only difference is that in 2000, when the Microsoft case was in the sentencing phase, George W. Bush became president and ordered the case effectively dropped; and in 1911 William H. Taft was president, and he let the Standard Oil case go through.
Welcome to Slashdot.
The way it looked to me they weren't suing them, just asking for a declaratory judgement. I guess it's a kind of lawsuit, but it looked more like HardOCP just telling a judge "These people keep threatening to sue us and it's creating uncertainty. Could you just just decide, let's pretend they'd sued us over the stuff they're threatening to sue over, hypothetically then who would win?". I don't know. i don't really understand it.
I think HardOCP made it pretty clear last time that they stand by their reporting. If Infinium wants to keep making threats they're going to keep getting ignored.
I know there's nothing but wannabe pretend-experts on slashdot, but I'm going to ask this anyway, on the offchance maybe there happen to be some wannabe pretend-experts who mostly post on Groklaw who wandered in by accident. I've been wondering for awhile:
From a legal standpoint, exactly how far and how often can you move toward *threatening* a lawsuit before it becomes illegal to not actually declare one?
Han always came across to me as shooting in self defense in the first movie. Among other things, he was facing a BOUNTY HUNTER. Do you NEED to let them shoot first to know what a bounty hunter for jabba the hutt is going to do to you?
The restoration doesn't clarify he was shooting in self defense. The restoration just implies Han was either so monumentally nice or so monumentally stupid that he couldn't see where this was going and wouldn't shoot to save his own skin unless the other person shot first.
What I can't stand about that change is that what the restoration ultimately means is that Han did not survive that scene because of quick thinking and reflexes and the cunning to have a gun already hidden. It means that Han survived the scene solely because Greedo missed.
Oops.
In addition to the fact EV1Servers is supporting SCO, it has just been neatly demonstrated EV1Servers is incapable of standing up to a slashdotting.
Not exactly a positive indicator of their abilities as a hosting provider, is it ^_^
The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right? Does the GPL mean whatever the FSF decides it means that week?
Well, the FSF did a very good job of backing up their claim that it is incompatible with the GPL. They pointed to the exact sections where the incompatibility occurs. Most people, including a number of the major Linux distributions, seem to agree with the FSF on this interpretation.
The "this week" comment is misleading. The FSF has never changed their opinion on the correct interpretation of the GPL and has tried to make the implications of this interpretation as clear as possible from day one.
More importantly, what exactly is the FSF supposed to do about people who don't agree with their current take and make use of Apache/XFree86-4.4 anyway? Are they going to sue them?
If someone alters a GPL program such that the code is linked with code from an incompatible license, the copyright holder of that code is within their rights to order the distributor of the mixed code to stop. If that distributor does not stop, the copyright holder is within their rights to sue the distributor to make them stop.
If the FSF were the copyright holder, they probably would sue if they absolutely had to in order to ensure compliance with the GPL. The FSF does hold the copyright on many open source projects, so this is a possibility.
Do they have the money, let alone the ability convince a court that the suit isn't frivilous?
Actually, yes, the main function of the FSF is to serve as a central copyright repository for open source and trust fund for the legal defense of those copyrights.
More importantly, can they afford the ill will that would result?
Can the open source software community afford to exist in a manner in which licenses are addressed in a slapdash, "oh that's close enough" manner? Since the nature of Open Source is to coordinate input from many contributors, the exact manner in which the rights and licensing to that input is marshalled is of extreme importance. The rights framework for open source needs to be clear and solid.
Moreover, I'm not sure exactly how much ill will the FSF would garner for enforcing the requirement that if you redistribute GPLed code you follow the terms of the GPL, especially since, well, if the GPL isn't going to be complied with then why does it exist in the first place? The only ill will this would generate is among people who don't think anything should be GPLed ever, and they hate the FSF anyway, so what's the loss?
Hey, er, I'm a longtime C programmer, starting a cross platform project in C++. Our goal is to use borland C++ builder 6 on MS 'DoH, and g++ on linux. I've been reading Bjarne, and he seems to think that most STL imps these days are pretty good. Is he smoking crack?
They've gotten better. However, this is only a very very recent development.
My plan for xplat compat is to test every day on both platforms so incompats don't creep in.
Good plan.
Actually, the question -- or the worry -- is more around how to prevent somebody from forking Java and kill the "Write Once, Run Everywhere" idiom.
... If you care about portability, you'll stick to the standard
This hasn't been a problem with C, so why should it be so with Java?
My God, man, have you ever tried to move STL code between compilers???
In other words, if MS were to put out a perfectly secure operating system, these companies would lose a good chuck of their revenues...
Now if that's not job security, nothing is.