Insightful post! QT wouldn't be where it is without the income it made licensing software, but at the same time, it couldn't dominate because of the license fees. I think Nokia has the kind of deep pockets to really put QT development on track. I think development will accelerate. Of course, I made my bet, and chose QT 4.5 for my company's next product, so now I have a vested interest in QT winning. Further, I'm learning QT, which I feel is about as hard as learning a foreign language (that is, to learn all of QT). By choosing this skill for myself rather than GTK+ or wxWindows, I force myself into a position with a strong vested interest in QT's domination.
Ah, the old open-source vs commercial flame-war. I write both. I'm very happy the Python QT bindings will be LGPL. That way, I can continue to contribute to the open-source community without having to learn two different GUI toolkits - one for open-source work, and one for commercial work. Do you know what a PITA it is to explain to management we need to negotiate a software license for a mysterious language like Python's mysterious QT binding library? Unless it costs under $1K, I have to explain that all the way up to our CEO. It's easier to just use some other software solution.
Interesting that you got modded negative... Anyway, it's in Nokia's interest for QT to "win" vs other solutions, like GTK+ and wxWindows. Having good Python bindings which users can use in their commercial software without paying for a license is an important step for Nokia. I don't know anyone who thinks GTK+ is superior to QT, so why did it win so far? It's not as portable, less well documented, etc. I think because it's LGPL, not GPL. It makes total sense.
Nokia's goal here seems pretty clear: They want to own the future of UI development. This will give them an advantage in every computing market they're in. They seem to be willing to give us all free software, and I mean "all" of us - those writing open-source software, and those writing commercial software, so long as they can drive it. So far, they seem like good stewards of their free software. Personally, I'm rooting for them. In fact, I'm new QT user. I'm using QT 4.5, but previous to that I used GTK and MFC. For better portability, we had made the decision to go with wxWindows, and then Nokia announced they were LGPL-ing QT. That was enough for me to scrap about a month of work I already had in wxWindows. Not that wxWindows is lame or anything, but QT is more mature. With Nokia backing it, I think it's odds of "winning" increase dramatically, and I don't want to be stuck maintaining an application developed with a toolkit that lost.
Now, I would be very interested in the details of the interaction between Nokia and Riverbank. Is Nokia showing an evil side, or was Riverbank pig-headed? It's just not cool for giants like Nokia to squash little guys like Riverbank. Did they at least offer to buy them for some real cash, like $1M? That's chump-change for Nokia, and would go far to further improve their "good guy" image in the open-source community.
Wow, that was quite an entertaining rant! I'm a new Qt user, but MOC doesn't bother me at all. It's less invasive than "MFC Class Wizard", and the extension to native C++ syntax is nice IMO, vs embedded pragmas. And that's some impressive nit-picking... "Fragments drive", well, only true on Windows, and I'm not. Should I also be against compilation of C++ into object files? "char const*"? Why on earth would I want to write that? Porting complication? Geeze, C++ has been a disaster for portability for 20 years, and GUI toolkits have been prime suspects. I doubt MOC makes things significantly worse, and at least Qt already has been ported everywhere. Slows rebuild? Compared too exactly which C++ GUI toolkit? In my experience so far, Qt is the fastest of the bunch, probably because Qt doesn't just include one huge GUI header file everywhere. Can't understand inner classes and templates? This is GUI code. If you use inner classes and templates, you lose 80% of all the GUI programmers out there. Save that stuff for the hard-core code that actually does interesting work. At least there, you can expect the reader of your code to be brilliant. GUI is art, but not exactly rocket science.
I'm personally a fan of what Nokia is doing. In general, the big GUI libraries need to be LGPL or BSD to gain the widest acceptance. Requiring license fees for non-GPL leaves companies like Nokia flapping in the wind with no solution. This is also why GTK gained so much momentum at Qt's expense. This allows me to learn one way to write code, and to be able to either contribute it to the open-source community (which I do often), or to sell it through my work (which I actually get paid for).
However, this is a troubling new way for a big company to crush a small one... "Give me your technology for free, or I'll rewrite it and then give it to the world for free." It sounds a bit like Microsoft.
Nice article! Sorry I guessed wrong about i4i. They belong in the "Microsoft screwed us" list, not in the patent troll list.
Still, I personally see software patents hindering innovation more often than rewarding it. Even worse would be giving into Microsoft's demands to limit patent trolls damages, which would give Micrsoft free license to ignore everyone else's patents while suing the heck out of the rest of us.
[rant] A bit more on the software patent crud we have to deal with today:
- Microsoft and others stifle innovation and competition through an immense patent portfolio and an angry mob of lawyers. It's no longer easy to build a good product and make money, because MS will come and sue you, while stealing your idea and driving you out of business with monopolistic power. - As a result, the one of the best ways to make money as an innovator is to file several stupid patents, and wait for Microsoft to violate one.
Have you seen what MS is doing to Google lately? It's darned hard to make freaking Bing go away and to get Google as the default search engine in IE. Not hard for you and me, but Joe Sixpack doesn't custom-configure anything. I want to strangle someone every time Norton pops up to remind me to pay them their extortion fee. The only reason I allow Windows in my house is games. It's basically a gaming platform. That's also the only reason I ever see it at my work. [/rant]
I4I said they would have sued sooner but were having financial problems.
I checked out the i4i web site. My impression is that i4i had financial problems because they were a dinky little company with almost no significant products. I suspect they had no more than one software developer, and were probably lucky to stay in business all this time. I doubt MS even bothered to ever meet with them. Their business, so far as I can tell, doesn't even significantly benefit from the patented idea, and in no way competes with Microsoft. I don't see how Microsoft's patent infringement hurt them in the least.
In other words, i4i is simply patent-trolling. A lot of tiny companies do this when they have hard times.
Would it be MS who said "well, we had a business meeting with them, lets implement their plan without them and run them out of business"?
Yes, this is the traditional Microsoft business strategy. There are lots of cases where they did this:
- These guys were the disk-compression company MS drove under. They won $120M in a lawsuit considered one of the best examples ever of how software patents can protect innovation. - Casualties include WordPerfect, and QuattroPro
There are also a lot of patent trolls sucking the life out of Microsoft:
All I can say is Microsoft made their bed, and now they have to sleep in it. No other company did more to force software patents through congress. D'oh!
I went and read the patent. It's actually about separating formatting from content. This is similar to CSS, but in this case, there would be no tags at all in the 'content' portion of the document at all. Instead, a 'metacode map' would be a code, like 'bold', and the start/stop address of the text affected. SFAIK, this is different than what other document formats do. I certainly haven't seen it before.
However, I totally agree that this sort of patent is bogus, and scary. We should not be able to patent such nonsense. And, we have Microsoft largely to blame for this situation. Back when the debate over software patents was hot in DC, they swarmed all over the place lobbying for software patents. I have to chuckle a bit when I see what it's gotten them into. Microsoft had fooled themselves into thinking they were the ones with the innovation, and they'd be the ones with the most important patents. In reality, they are most famous for stealing the innovation of others, and for having deep pockets, a patent-troll heaven.
Now we're seeing insane damages, like $240M. Microsoft isn't significantly benefiting from the idea in this patent, it just got caught accidentally in violation of a more-or-less useless idea. This patent only barely passes the 'is this useful' test required for patents. Now big companies like Microsoft who fought for software patents want to 'cap' damages, so settlements will be more reasonable. However, when Microsoft sues a small company, damages of even $1M could kill it. Simply capping damages would effectively make Microsoft immune to law-suits, while they trash all the little guys with their lawyers. It's the perfect situation for Microsoft, and the worst possible situation for innovation.
The best solution is to stop issuing software patents. They hurt everybody.
Don't forget the whole "Don't be Evil" thing. Notice that Google is not having "Screw Microsoft" meetings in DC, and if they did, everyone would be shocked. It's funny how much this sort of thing effects company actions. Overall, I'm a fan of both Microsoft and Google, but I trust Google to be a better steward of things I care about, like a digital on-line library. You have to like Bill Gates for his foundation, and for supporting the disabled with special Windows features, but his company has been ruthless and underhanded in business for decades.
Actually, T-Mobile G1 has free roaming on the AT&T, so my coverage is always at least as good as AT&T. I love hacking Android, but HTC makes crappy phones. I think that's the real reason they aren't selling well. Basically, it's a sucky phone. In particular:
- Battery life is a joke. It's a smart-phone with a bright color display and the old Razr battery. - There's no headphone jack. Instead, you get a kludge-cord that connects your headset through the power jack. - The camera takes butt-ugly pictures - The speaker is too quite. You can't hear your call or music in traffic or on a plane - Cheap construction - the glass lens cover on mine broke when I dropped the phone 2 feet onto carpet. - The phone is ugly, and has a small display when compared to an iPhone. - It's actually *more* expensive than an iPhone, once you buy some flash memory for it.
In short, only dorks and geeks like me who love hacking Android and hate getting screwed by Apple are buying G1's, and it's HTC's fault. I'll consider buying a different Android phone if someone could please just add a damned headphone jack!
My father flew F-102's, the first supersonic aircraft commissioned for battle by the US Air Force. If you get the "official" Air Force post card of the F-102, my dad's flying it. He flew Delta jets later until he retired a few years ago. He told me about red-coloured lightning going up from clouds into the sky when I was a kid (1970's), and the other pilots also knew about them, too. Are these the same as the "sprites" mentioned here?
I've run across some of the ex-wives of top Oracle execs (my mother sells houses in Woodside, and many Oracle ex-wives are quite rich). It's a warped view, third hand through my mother, but they would paint Ellison as being very emotionally involved in taking on Microsoft, and running things very much based on his own ego. I'm not surprised he's buying Sun, and I would be surprised if he didn't shove OpenOffice and Java down MS's throat using Oracle's full backing. I'm surprised he hasn't bought Red Hat yet, just to take on Microsoft in earnest. Remember when he wanted to buy Apple? Everyone worries he'll drop MySQL development, but I think a wait-and-see attitude makes sense. Oracle hasn't been a champion of open-source like Sun and IBM, but maybe buying Sun will bring them into the community. Another huge corporation backing open source would be very welcome.
I think California's laws against non-competition contracts should be adopted nation wide. It works wonders for the economy when employees can say to their boss, "Screw you, I'm starting my own business, and I'll kick your butt!"
It is normal for businesses to try and collude to tie down their employees, and restrict competition. It's a natural result of the pursuit of money. What we need are laws restricting this in a very effective manner. California has done the best job, SFAIK.
I'm really looking forward to writing cell phone apps in QT4. The way Apple, Google, and Palm have caged their apps into power-hungry slow interpreted virtual environments is crazy. It's a cell phone.... code should be compiled. Anyway, there's tens of thousands of great apps for Linux that would easily port if the phone companies allowed it. For example, I see that the espeak speech synthesiser was ported to Android, but to do it required a custom negotiation with Google! You can't just port C apps to Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre... you need special permission. Similarly, all the great close-sourced apps, like speech recognition and high-end GPS navigation, are all compiled apps and require negotiated contracts for support on the phone. All we geeks get to write are pretty interpreted interfaces that call the pre-compiled stuff.
OpenMoko was on the right track with their Linux phone. Unfortunately, the company behind it is more paranoid than Apple, and has sucked all the fun out of developing for that platform. I think the concept of free, open-source software must translate to "innovative way to suck a few bucks out of geeks" in Taiwan.
Actually, this sort of agreement is common practice, even in Silicon Valley. One example: I left QuickLogic to join Synplicity. Soon after, all my friends were joining Synplicity. QuickLogic was a customer of Synplicity. QuickLogic's CEO had a talk with Synplicity's CEO, and soon after I was told that we don't hire QuickLogic people any more. BTW, both QuickLogic and Synplicity were fantastic companies to work for back then. We'd simply stripped (without meaning too) most of the software talent from QuickLogic, so it's understandable their CEO was pissed. Regardless of the law, most companies can't afford too piss off their customers.
The only thing strange about that situation was it's technically illegal in California. However, such practice is perfectly legal here in NC where I live now. My old boss had an employee in our group that was very good. My boss went to Avanti, and told them never, under any conditions, would he allow that employee to switch to Avanti. You see, in NC, most employees have legally binding non-competition clauses in their employment agreements, which tend to stand up in court, so if you want to change jobs, your boss can threaten sue you directly. This is one of the main reasons high-tech startups suck wind here. Anyway, Avanti saw my old boss's passion about this one guy, so they offered him a job he couldn't refuse right away. D'oh!
Condolences on the death of your friend. I'm sure time has healed a lot of bad feelings. I'm sure you know, as only thick-skinned people post on slashdot, that the general nature here is to tear down anyone who posts. Some responses to your post seemed heartless to me, given that you're talking about the death of your friend. Don't believe that out in reader land those posters represent anything but a pathetic fringe.
I agree, Dan was basically right, seven years ago. The situation hasn't improved much. My prediction:
- As we start running out of IPv4 addresses, ISPs will start selling them to each other. Suddenly, we'll start using IP addresses wisely. - There are only 111 million active domain names. Most of those point to shared IPs on virtual hosts and domain name squatters. - With so few actual required IP addresses, the IPv6 transition will never happen.
We geeks like to think that the world will naturally adopt new, better technologies, simply because it would be the right thing. Reality is far different:
- Consider UTF-16 and UTF-32. They basically delayed multi-language support world-wide until UTF-8 made it painless for developers, allowing them to continue using 'char' data types in C for strings. - NAT may have been invented by geeks for various cool reasons. However, it dominates the web because our ISPs like to charge extra money for multiple IP addresses, and we consumers like to dick them out of it. - ISPs dynamically switch our IP addresses to protect us. A dynamically changing network is far harder to attack, especially when consumers know virtually nothing about security. On a drive through South Carolina recently, I found about 80% of all WiFi points were wide open! - ISPs would love to force customers onto another level of NAT. They could kill a ton of P2P traffic, with a great excuse for the FCC: "I ran out of addresses!" - The SIP protocol was designed by committee, like IPv6. It basically doesn't work across NATs worth a damn, and it's slowed VoIP adoption by years.
TCP and UDP increase our addressable space to 48 bits, which should last the rest of our lifetimes. IPv6 should have seen the success of these protocols and created an extension to IPv4 that would work with old equipment and software.
So, why doesn't Harper Collins publish through Barnes and Noble, and also any of the smaller e-book sites that offer PDF formated books?
If you feel the technology is an issue, I offer to build an e-book publishing site for you, for free. A sales site for e-books that watermarks each download is a straightforward (though non-trivial) task.
The watermark is a hard-to-remove non-visible (or nearly so) change to the PDF that makes it unique compared to every other copy of the book. Done well, it can be nearly impossible to detect and remove. You could even embed a water mark in the text itself that would show in any converted format. If your book shows up on an illegal BitTorrent site, you can compare the watermark to the sales database and find the culprit who shared the book. This is essentially how iTunes works now, so it's a fairly well proven business model.
The distributors (Amazon particularly) naturally want as strong a monopoly as possible. In that they are fairly successful, I don't blame publishers for making their works available on Kindle, Sony, and Google. That's a simple business decision. Since the distributors have cool products consumers want (the Kindle, Sony eReader), I don't even blame the customers.
However, if you want to support the creation of a truly free and profitable market for e-books, please also publish a PDF through any of the excellent smaller e-book publishers. You can use watermark identifiers to deter would-be file-shares, just like Apple now does with music. Customers will love you for it.
The alternative is to roll over and become a slave to Amazon. That's a bleak outlook for publishers and consumers.
I'm not saying you should read ebooks in PDF format. I'm saying the publisher should publish in PDF. That way, no information is lost. You can use your prefered e-book format, with any of the translators available for free. In my case, I convert to a.txt file, and strip out any pesky UTF-8 characters, and then my screen reader speaks it to me. On some devices, HTML may be best, as you suggest. However, if you start in HTML, you've permanently lost formatting information that other readers may want. For example, maybe I want to print it to my color printer, and read it in dead-tree form.
There are too many formats for every e-publisher to support, but if they support PDF, they cover pretty much everything. By picking Kindle-only, or encrypted Mobipocket, they miss a ton of the market. Worse, they encourage the creation of new monopolistic publishing sites, like iTunes, which will suck the profits out of their industry. Even worse, many simply don't publish on-line. I don't think authors realise how frustrating that is to users who just want to buy their work. My solution is to buy a copy, then pirate the electronic version. What a PITA for everyone!
Yes, I heard about it, but thanks for confirming it. I got use to Amazon while Apple was still DRM-ing, and now I prefer their service. In general, I prefer to support other vendors than Apple. It's just not healthy for the industry to have only one significant distributor.
Nonsense. This is precisely the problem the article describes. Just publish in PDF. We all (customers, that is) want it in PDF. Every book reader out there can read it, and free translators exist for almost any format you want. Every other format out there for e-books is designed to keep the users from doing what we want, which is to copy it from one of my devices to another. Listen to what we customers want, and forget what you want to sell me. It's really pretty simple. I want to read it on my netbook, kindle, or smart-phone. I want my screen reader to speak it to me. Quit restricting me from using your books, and let me buy them!
It's even worse for books. I haven't read a dead-tree book in a while. Instead, I load the text into the Orca screen reader, and play it at high speed (about 460 words per minute). There are tons of texts out there that are only available in encrypted form, and many that aren't legally available on the Internet at all. Shame on those publishers and authors! How do blind people buy their products? What I've settled on for books that are not legally available in unencrypted form is buying the real thing or a license to the encrypted version, and then downloading the illegal version. There's one author I particularly like that I'm thinking of sending $100, with a letter asking him to be more open with his works. His poor judgement has turned his entire life's work into a very popular free download, while insulting the blind, and causing guys like me a lot of grief.
Anyway, I agree with the author that the BSA is not nearly as hated an organisation, partly because the software industry reacted less stupidly to the pirating. Book publishers are next on the list of casualties, and once again, it's much their own fault. They are busy giving Amazon a monopoly on e-books, just like the music industry did when they handed distribution to Apple. Good luck negotiating a fair deal with Amazon when they are the only game in town. Personally, I will gladly buy music from Amazon, since I can play it on my Linux box, or anywhere I like. I will never buy a Kindle book, or a song from Apple, so long as they are locked to the vendor's devices. The book industry needs to get a clue and learn a few lessons from the software and music industries.
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Insightful post! QT wouldn't be where it is without the income it made licensing software, but at the same time, it couldn't dominate because of the license fees. I think Nokia has the kind of deep pockets to really put QT development on track. I think development will accelerate. Of course, I made my bet, and chose QT 4.5 for my company's next product, so now I have a vested interest in QT winning. Further, I'm learning QT, which I feel is about as hard as learning a foreign language (that is, to learn all of QT). By choosing this skill for myself rather than GTK+ or wxWindows, I force myself into a position with a strong vested interest in QT's domination.
Ah, the old open-source vs commercial flame-war. I write both. I'm very happy the Python QT bindings will be LGPL. That way, I can continue to contribute to the open-source community without having to learn two different GUI toolkits - one for open-source work, and one for commercial work. Do you know what a PITA it is to explain to management we need to negotiate a software license for a mysterious language like Python's mysterious QT binding library? Unless it costs under $1K, I have to explain that all the way up to our CEO. It's easier to just use some other software solution.
Interesting that you got modded negative... Anyway, it's in Nokia's interest for QT to "win" vs other solutions, like GTK+ and wxWindows. Having good Python bindings which users can use in their commercial software without paying for a license is an important step for Nokia. I don't know anyone who thinks GTK+ is superior to QT, so why did it win so far? It's not as portable, less well documented, etc. I think because it's LGPL, not GPL. It makes total sense.
Nokia's goal here seems pretty clear: They want to own the future of UI development. This will give them an advantage in every computing market they're in. They seem to be willing to give us all free software, and I mean "all" of us - those writing open-source software, and those writing commercial software, so long as they can drive it. So far, they seem like good stewards of their free software. Personally, I'm rooting for them. In fact, I'm new QT user. I'm using QT 4.5, but previous to that I used GTK and MFC. For better portability, we had made the decision to go with wxWindows, and then Nokia announced they were LGPL-ing QT. That was enough for me to scrap about a month of work I already had in wxWindows. Not that wxWindows is lame or anything, but QT is more mature. With Nokia backing it, I think it's odds of "winning" increase dramatically, and I don't want to be stuck maintaining an application developed with a toolkit that lost.
Now, I would be very interested in the details of the interaction between Nokia and Riverbank. Is Nokia showing an evil side, or was Riverbank pig-headed? It's just not cool for giants like Nokia to squash little guys like Riverbank. Did they at least offer to buy them for some real cash, like $1M? That's chump-change for Nokia, and would go far to further improve their "good guy" image in the open-source community.
Wow, that was quite an entertaining rant! I'm a new Qt user, but MOC doesn't bother me at all. It's less invasive than "MFC Class Wizard", and the extension to native C++ syntax is nice IMO, vs embedded pragmas. And that's some impressive nit-picking... "Fragments drive", well, only true on Windows, and I'm not. Should I also be against compilation of C++ into object files? "char const*"? Why on earth would I want to write that? Porting complication? Geeze, C++ has been a disaster for portability for 20 years, and GUI toolkits have been prime suspects. I doubt MOC makes things significantly worse, and at least Qt already has been ported everywhere. Slows rebuild? Compared too exactly which C++ GUI toolkit? In my experience so far, Qt is the fastest of the bunch, probably because Qt doesn't just include one huge GUI header file everywhere. Can't understand inner classes and templates? This is GUI code. If you use inner classes and templates, you lose 80% of all the GUI programmers out there. Save that stuff for the hard-core code that actually does interesting work. At least there, you can expect the reader of your code to be brilliant. GUI is art, but not exactly rocket science.
I'm personally a fan of what Nokia is doing. In general, the big GUI libraries need to be LGPL or BSD to gain the widest acceptance. Requiring license fees for non-GPL leaves companies like Nokia flapping in the wind with no solution. This is also why GTK gained so much momentum at Qt's expense. This allows me to learn one way to write code, and to be able to either contribute it to the open-source community (which I do often), or to sell it through my work (which I actually get paid for).
However, this is a troubling new way for a big company to crush a small one... "Give me your technology for free, or I'll rewrite it and then give it to the world for free." It sounds a bit like Microsoft.
Nice article! Sorry I guessed wrong about i4i. They belong in the "Microsoft screwed us" list, not in the patent troll list.
Still, I personally see software patents hindering innovation more often than rewarding it. Even worse would be giving into Microsoft's demands to limit patent trolls damages, which would give Micrsoft free license to ignore everyone else's patents while suing the heck out of the rest of us.
[rant]
A bit more on the software patent crud we have to deal with today:
- Microsoft and others stifle innovation and competition through an immense patent portfolio and an angry mob of lawyers. It's no longer easy to build a good product and make money, because MS will come and sue you, while stealing your idea and driving you out of business with monopolistic power.
- As a result, the one of the best ways to make money as an innovator is to file several stupid patents, and wait for Microsoft to violate one.
Have you seen what MS is doing to Google lately? It's darned hard to make freaking Bing go away and to get Google as the default search engine in IE. Not hard for you and me, but Joe Sixpack doesn't custom-configure anything. I want to strangle someone every time Norton pops up to remind me to pay them their extortion fee. The only reason I allow Windows in my house is games. It's basically a gaming platform. That's also the only reason I ever see it at my work.
[/rant]
There. Now I feel better.
I checked out the i4i web site. My impression is that i4i had financial problems because they were a dinky little company with almost no significant products. I suspect they had no more than one software developer, and were probably lucky to stay in business all this time. I doubt MS even bothered to ever meet with them. Their business, so far as I can tell, doesn't even significantly benefit from the patented idea, and in no way competes with Microsoft. I don't see how Microsoft's patent infringement hurt them in the least.
In other words, i4i is simply patent-trolling. A lot of tiny companies do this when they have hard times.
Yes, this is the traditional Microsoft business strategy. There are lots of cases where they did this:
- These guys were the disk-compression company MS drove under. They won $120M in a lawsuit considered one of the best examples ever of how software patents can protect innovation.
- Casualties include WordPerfect, and QuattroPro
There are also a lot of patent trolls sucking the life out of Microsoft:
- They were ordered to pay $521M to the "inventor" of browser plug-ins
- They were ordered to pay $367M to Alcatel/Lucent in some sort of user interface patent nonsense.
- They were ordered to pay $388M to Uniloc, for a patent about registering software during installation.
- Korea is one of the few other countries to jump on the patent-troll suck-life-out-of-MS bandwagon.
All I can say is Microsoft made their bed, and now they have to sleep in it. No other company did more to force software patents through congress. D'oh!
I went and read the patent. It's actually about separating formatting from content. This is similar to CSS, but in this case, there would be no tags at all in the 'content' portion of the document at all. Instead, a 'metacode map' would be a code, like 'bold', and the start/stop address of the text affected. SFAIK, this is different than what other document formats do. I certainly haven't seen it before.
However, I totally agree that this sort of patent is bogus, and scary. We should not be able to patent such nonsense. And, we have Microsoft largely to blame for this situation. Back when the debate over software patents was hot in DC, they swarmed all over the place lobbying for software patents. I have to chuckle a bit when I see what it's gotten them into. Microsoft had fooled themselves into thinking they were the ones with the innovation, and they'd be the ones with the most important patents. In reality, they are most famous for stealing the innovation of others, and for having deep pockets, a patent-troll heaven.
Now we're seeing insane damages, like $240M. Microsoft isn't significantly benefiting from the idea in this patent, it just got caught accidentally in violation of a more-or-less useless idea. This patent only barely passes the 'is this useful' test required for patents. Now big companies like Microsoft who fought for software patents want to 'cap' damages, so settlements will be more reasonable. However, when Microsoft sues a small company, damages of even $1M could kill it. Simply capping damages would effectively make Microsoft immune to law-suits, while they trash all the little guys with their lawyers. It's the perfect situation for Microsoft, and the worst possible situation for innovation.
The best solution is to stop issuing software patents. They hurt everybody.
Well... that sounds VERY much like Microsoft, but they are saving lives, and educating children. They have to get some credit for the good they do.
Don't forget the whole "Don't be Evil" thing. Notice that Google is not having "Screw Microsoft" meetings in DC, and if they did, everyone would be shocked. It's funny how much this sort of thing effects company actions. Overall, I'm a fan of both Microsoft and Google, but I trust Google to be a better steward of things I care about, like a digital on-line library. You have to like Bill Gates for his foundation, and for supporting the disabled with special Windows features, but his company has been ruthless and underhanded in business for decades.
Actually, T-Mobile G1 has free roaming on the AT&T, so my coverage is always at least as good as AT&T. I love hacking Android, but HTC makes crappy phones. I think that's the real reason they aren't selling well. Basically, it's a sucky phone. In particular:
- Battery life is a joke. It's a smart-phone with a bright color display and the old Razr battery.
- There's no headphone jack. Instead, you get a kludge-cord that connects your headset through the power jack.
- The camera takes butt-ugly pictures
- The speaker is too quite. You can't hear your call or music in traffic or on a plane
- Cheap construction - the glass lens cover on mine broke when I dropped the phone 2 feet onto carpet.
- The phone is ugly, and has a small display when compared to an iPhone.
- It's actually *more* expensive than an iPhone, once you buy some flash memory for it.
In short, only dorks and geeks like me who love hacking Android and hate getting screwed by Apple are buying G1's, and it's HTC's fault. I'll consider buying a different Android phone if someone could please just add a damned headphone jack!
My father flew F-102's, the first supersonic aircraft commissioned for battle by the US Air Force. If you get the "official" Air Force post card of the F-102, my dad's flying it. He flew Delta jets later until he retired a few years ago. He told me about red-coloured lightning going up from clouds into the sky when I was a kid (1970's), and the other pilots also knew about them, too. Are these the same as the "sprites" mentioned here?
I've run across some of the ex-wives of top Oracle execs (my mother sells houses in Woodside, and many Oracle ex-wives are quite rich). It's a warped view, third hand through my mother, but they would paint Ellison as being very emotionally involved in taking on Microsoft, and running things very much based on his own ego. I'm not surprised he's buying Sun, and I would be surprised if he didn't shove OpenOffice and Java down MS's throat using Oracle's full backing. I'm surprised he hasn't bought Red Hat yet, just to take on Microsoft in earnest. Remember when he wanted to buy Apple? Everyone worries he'll drop MySQL development, but I think a wait-and-see attitude makes sense. Oracle hasn't been a champion of open-source like Sun and IBM, but maybe buying Sun will bring them into the community. Another huge corporation backing open source would be very welcome.
I think California's laws against non-competition contracts should be adopted nation wide. It works wonders for the economy when employees can say to their boss, "Screw you, I'm starting my own business, and I'll kick your butt!"
It is normal for businesses to try and collude to tie down their employees, and restrict competition. It's a natural result of the pursuit of money. What we need are laws restricting this in a very effective manner. California has done the best job, SFAIK.
I'm really looking forward to writing cell phone apps in QT4. The way Apple, Google, and Palm have caged their apps into power-hungry slow interpreted virtual environments is crazy. It's a cell phone.... code should be compiled. Anyway, there's tens of thousands of great apps for Linux that would easily port if the phone companies allowed it. For example, I see that the espeak speech synthesiser was ported to Android, but to do it required a custom negotiation with Google! You can't just port C apps to Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre... you need special permission. Similarly, all the great close-sourced apps, like speech recognition and high-end GPS navigation, are all compiled apps and require negotiated contracts for support on the phone. All we geeks get to write are pretty interpreted interfaces that call the pre-compiled stuff.
OpenMoko was on the right track with their Linux phone. Unfortunately, the company behind it is more paranoid than Apple, and has sucked all the fun out of developing for that platform. I think the concept of free, open-source software must translate to "innovative way to suck a few bucks out of geeks" in Taiwan.
Actually, this sort of agreement is common practice, even in Silicon Valley. One example: I left QuickLogic to join Synplicity. Soon after, all my friends were joining Synplicity. QuickLogic was a customer of Synplicity. QuickLogic's CEO had a talk with Synplicity's CEO, and soon after I was told that we don't hire QuickLogic people any more. BTW, both QuickLogic and Synplicity were fantastic companies to work for back then. We'd simply stripped (without meaning too) most of the software talent from QuickLogic, so it's understandable their CEO was pissed. Regardless of the law, most companies can't afford too piss off their customers.
The only thing strange about that situation was it's technically illegal in California. However, such practice is perfectly legal here in NC where I live now. My old boss had an employee in our group that was very good. My boss went to Avanti, and told them never, under any conditions, would he allow that employee to switch to Avanti. You see, in NC, most employees have legally binding non-competition clauses in their employment agreements, which tend to stand up in court, so if you want to change jobs, your boss can threaten sue you directly. This is one of the main reasons high-tech startups suck wind here. Anyway, Avanti saw my old boss's passion about this one guy, so they offered him a job he couldn't refuse right away. D'oh!
Condolences on the death of your friend. I'm sure time has healed a lot of bad feelings. I'm sure you know, as only thick-skinned people post on slashdot, that the general nature here is to tear down anyone who posts. Some responses to your post seemed heartless to me, given that you're talking about the death of your friend. Don't believe that out in reader land those posters represent anything but a pathetic fringe.
I agree, Dan was basically right, seven years ago. The situation hasn't improved much. My prediction:
- As we start running out of IPv4 addresses, ISPs will start selling them to each other. Suddenly, we'll start using IP addresses wisely.
- There are only 111 million active domain names. Most of those point to shared IPs on virtual hosts and domain name squatters.
- With so few actual required IP addresses, the IPv6 transition will never happen.
We geeks like to think that the world will naturally adopt new, better technologies, simply because it would be the right thing. Reality is far different:
- Consider UTF-16 and UTF-32. They basically delayed multi-language support world-wide until UTF-8 made it painless for developers, allowing them to continue using 'char' data types in C for strings.
- NAT may have been invented by geeks for various cool reasons. However, it dominates the web because our ISPs like to charge extra money for multiple IP addresses, and we consumers like to dick them out of it.
- ISPs dynamically switch our IP addresses to protect us. A dynamically changing network is far harder to attack, especially when consumers know virtually nothing about security. On a drive through South Carolina recently, I found about 80% of all WiFi points were wide open!
- ISPs would love to force customers onto another level of NAT. They could kill a ton of P2P traffic, with a great excuse for the FCC: "I ran out of addresses!"
- The SIP protocol was designed by committee, like IPv6. It basically doesn't work across NATs worth a damn, and it's slowed VoIP adoption by years.
TCP and UDP increase our addressable space to 48 bits, which should last the rest of our lifetimes. IPv6 should have seen the success of these protocols and created an extension to IPv4 that would work with old equipment and software.
So, why doesn't Harper Collins publish through Barnes and Noble, and also any of the smaller e-book sites that offer PDF formated books?
If you feel the technology is an issue, I offer to build an e-book publishing site for you, for free. A sales site for e-books that watermarks each download is a straightforward (though non-trivial) task.
The watermark is a hard-to-remove non-visible (or nearly so) change to the PDF that makes it unique compared to every other copy of the book. Done well, it can be nearly impossible to detect and remove. You could even embed a water mark in the text itself that would show in any converted format. If your book shows up on an illegal BitTorrent site, you can compare the watermark to the sales database and find the culprit who shared the book. This is essentially how iTunes works now, so it's a fairly well proven business model.
The distributors (Amazon particularly) naturally want as strong a monopoly as possible. In that they are fairly successful, I don't blame publishers for making their works available on Kindle, Sony, and Google. That's a simple business decision. Since the distributors have cool products consumers want (the Kindle, Sony eReader), I don't even blame the customers.
However, if you want to support the creation of a truly free and profitable market for e-books, please also publish a PDF through any of the excellent smaller e-book publishers. You can use watermark identifiers to deter would-be file-shares, just like Apple now does with music. Customers will love you for it.
The alternative is to roll over and become a slave to Amazon. That's a bleak outlook for publishers and consumers.
I'm not saying you should read ebooks in PDF format. I'm saying the publisher should publish in PDF. That way, no information is lost. You can use your prefered e-book format, with any of the translators available for free. In my case, I convert to a .txt file, and strip out any pesky UTF-8 characters, and then my screen reader speaks it to me. On some devices, HTML may be best, as you suggest. However, if you start in HTML, you've permanently lost formatting information that other readers may want. For example, maybe I want to print it to my color printer, and read it in dead-tree form.
There are too many formats for every e-publisher to support, but if they support PDF, they cover pretty much everything. By picking Kindle-only, or encrypted Mobipocket, they miss a ton of the market. Worse, they encourage the creation of new monopolistic publishing sites, like iTunes, which will suck the profits out of their industry. Even worse, many simply don't publish on-line. I don't think authors realise how frustrating that is to users who just want to buy their work. My solution is to buy a copy, then pirate the electronic version. What a PITA for everyone!
Yes, I heard about it, but thanks for confirming it. I got use to Amazon while Apple was still DRM-ing, and now I prefer their service. In general, I prefer to support other vendors than Apple. It's just not healthy for the industry to have only one significant distributor.
Nonsense. This is precisely the problem the article describes. Just publish in PDF. We all (customers, that is) want it in PDF. Every book reader out there can read it, and free translators exist for almost any format you want. Every other format out there for e-books is designed to keep the users from doing what we want, which is to copy it from one of my devices to another. Listen to what we customers want, and forget what you want to sell me. It's really pretty simple. I want to read it on my netbook, kindle, or smart-phone. I want my screen reader to speak it to me. Quit restricting me from using your books, and let me buy them!
It's even worse for books. I haven't read a dead-tree book in a while. Instead, I load the text into the Orca screen reader, and play it at high speed (about 460 words per minute). There are tons of texts out there that are only available in encrypted form, and many that aren't legally available on the Internet at all. Shame on those publishers and authors! How do blind people buy their products? What I've settled on for books that are not legally available in unencrypted form is buying the real thing or a license to the encrypted version, and then downloading the illegal version. There's one author I particularly like that I'm thinking of sending $100, with a letter asking him to be more open with his works. His poor judgement has turned his entire life's work into a very popular free download, while insulting the blind, and causing guys like me a lot of grief.
Anyway, I agree with the author that the BSA is not nearly as hated an organisation, partly because the software industry reacted less stupidly to the pirating. Book publishers are next on the list of casualties, and once again, it's much their own fault. They are busy giving Amazon a monopoly on e-books, just like the music industry did when they handed distribution to Apple. Good luck negotiating a fair deal with Amazon when they are the only game in town. Personally, I will gladly buy music from Amazon, since I can play it on my Linux box, or anywhere I like. I will never buy a Kindle book, or a song from Apple, so long as they are locked to the vendor's devices. The book industry needs to get a clue and learn a few lessons from the software and music industries.