OSX is a particularly crappy performer, unless apps are specifically written to take advantage of it.
Windows XP may be slow(ish), but it's a damn sight faster for real time computing than Linux (except, possibly, Linux-with-Alan-Cox's-low-latency-kernel). The price you pay for stability, I suppose.
Nope, Steinberg won't do Linux because they feel Linux isn't able to deliver the performance they want. Before you start yapping 'low latency kernel', consider the direction Steinberg's been taking off late, with VST, VST2 and now VST System Link, not to mention their ASIO standard that aims to whack latency down to almost nothing: Steinberg is interested in real-time computing. Linux may be good for a lot of things, but real time virtual studio work isn't one of them.
BTW, claiming that Steinberg is 'moving towards a hardware based solution in the future' is pure FUD and has no basis in reality whatsoever. Steinberg is, after all, the company, that continually thinks up new standards and protocols for making studio work on a computer a better experience. Oh, and just for the record, no, I don't work for them, nor do I own any of their software as I can't afford it.
Until the software's written, there's no point in making a distro to pretend that it is
True. However, we've recently seen it *is* possible to use *nix for pro audio, provided you tailor your *nix of choice specifically for the purpose. Apple did endless tweaking to theirs and right now, if you use apps that were specifically written for it, such as Ableton Live, OSX is quite a stellar performer.
Whether any software company is actually going to take the trouble to write for Linux is a different matter entirely, but I'd sure like to have PD run on something that performs a little better than vanilla Linux.
Unfortunately for Apple, they're likely to turn away knowledgable users with those ads.
I don't think Apple is after knowledgable users. Knowledgable users appreciate strength in numbers - if you use the same setup as a whole lot of other people, you're more likely to find someone, either in real life or on the net, who's dealt with some of the problems you're facing.
This, to me at least, is what makes Linux such a dream to use - because 99% of its users are tech-savvy and net-connected, a quick google will usually help you out when you're stuck. It works for Windows too, but only because of the sheer number of Windows users. Try feeding obscure Mac problems to groups.google.com.
Actually, I like the term. That is to say, I've always interpreted it to mean 'anything that's done on a computer'. Plus, probably, some synths and samplers, though that's by no means necessary.
It's a neutral term that doesn't tell you anything about the music it describes except from how it was made, which is good, IMHO.
I vastly prefer it over things like 'post-minimalist soundscape techno', 'retro-rave-intelligent-dance-music' or crap like that.
Plaid, Tortoise, Squarepusher & Stereolab all fall within a similar genre - this guy doesn't seem to know yet what he's going to be into. Here's a somewhat broader primer-for-quality-electronic-music(tm):
Aphex Twin: freaky beatfuckery. If you like this, move on to stuff released on Warp Records, Rephlex Records, Planet Mu, Skam, etc
Ritchie Hawtin's "Concept": fairly accessible minimal techno. If you like this, it's time to move to Germany;-). Anything on Mille Plateaux/Force Inc will be worth exploring next.
Four Tet: organic instrumental music that just so happens to be made on a computer. Not very beat heavy. Like this? Then get yourself a stack of records released on Domino, Morr Music, the Leaf label, etc.etc.
Luke Vibert aka Wagonchrist hilariously cocky hiphop-esque sampling fests. Bits taken from old easytune records, some jazz, some downright weird stuff that's guaranteed to put a cheeky smirk on your face. If you find this amusing, you'll like a lot of what comes out on Ninja Tune.
Kit Clayton somewhere between Aphex Twin and Ritchie Hawtin, it's techno that keeps your brain occupied while your ass is bouncing on the dancefloor. Again Mille Plateaux/Force Inc will have stuff you'll like, but Shitkatapult 's pretty good for this as well, as is Kompakt. Not to mention a veritable army of American boys with powerbooks.
For more commercially viable electronics, there's quite a few pointers elsewhere on this page.
just push your mail providers to install a virus scanner on ther mailer daemon side..
Not necessarily something a provider wants to do. For starters, scanning thousands upon thousands of incoming e-mails puts a heavy strain on the servers. More importantly, however, is that by doing so a provider implicitly admits legal responsibility for what their users are doing on their systems. If you can read through users' e-mails to determine if they're infected with a virus, Big Bad Government is going to come in to ask you to scan for evidence of illegal actions as well.
For this reason, my employer has, for now, decided to forego server side virus scanning, and I pretty much would agree with him.
Re:link request & loose thoughts
on
MP3 for Gameboy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There was this product awhile back that was kind of an integrated low-level sound synth and sequencer/drum machine for the normal, 4-color gameboy. It was only available in europe, and you could make these REALLY funky tiny little techno tunes on it. Very aphexy. Does anyone remember the name of this, or have a link?
I think you're referring to Nanoloop, which can be found here.
Let's see - suppose I'd build my own content management system in php. What would I call the page where site admins get to do their admining?
Ok. Now I need a name for the page that contains the backend. "stuffrunningasabackend.php"? Nah...
Best make my system modular - saves so much trouble when I'm trying to fix something afterwards. Let's see, what do I need for that....
Do you have any idea how many php content management thingies are out there, some of which are indeed offshoots of phpNuke (which is considered to be unsafe as hell, which is why there's so many alternatives)?
KPNQwest *is* down. My host, which turns out to buy its bandwidth from KPNQwest, was forced to move all of their servers to a different farm in another part of NL last night.
Re:and furthermore (found sounds)...
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 2
One of the coolest Einstuerzende Neubauten tracks featured them flicking the master power switch of their studio on and off.
I was most definitely *not* referring to IDM (that has to be the worst, most conceited and downright stupid name to be given to a genre of music ever).
'Clicks and Cuts', 'Micromusic' or whatever the hell has more in common with techno. In fact, I personally call it 'experimental techno', for good reason, too. Check out some stuff by Taylor Deupree (mentioned in the article) for instance, that's techno with Cool Sounds (tm).
A quick history lesson: apart from musique concrete and its offspring, in 1999-2000 there was a subgenre of techno called 'heroin house', on labels like Chain Reaction (a Basic Channel offshoot) that, also in fact, put out the first releases by people like Vladislav Delay, who later got lumped in with the glitch crowd, then, when he did a cheeky house-ish album, with 'microhouse'.
At the same time, there was a strong 'experimental electronics' scene, with imprints such as Raster-Noton (home of the only true glitch meister Carsten 'alva.noto' Nicolai) that started to take pointers from popular dance music. Some clever Wire journalist then figured these two movements ('experimental techno' and 'experimental electronics') yielded similar sounding result and called the 'movement' Glitch.
Over in the US, a similar convergence between academic experimentalism and techno was produced by people like Taylor Deupree, Kit Clayton and Sutekh.
None of this has anything to do with IDM. In fact, most of my IDM loving friends *hate* this experimental electronica, because to them it's boring and repetitive (to me, IDM is convoluted and tiring, but then that's just me).
Anyway, this is a rant. Mod me as such. The point is, I wasn't referring to IDM at all.
Re:Heard this before somewhere :).
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I know you're joking, but....
These tracks, like all 'noisy' tracks, compress like shit, actually. MP3 encoders completely destroys them, as (I'm guessing) they figure it's unwanted noise or something. Even at 256k, some 'glitch', 'micromusic', 'lowercase' or whatever the hell it's called today, gets mangled beyond repair.
Which is just one reason why experimental musicians don't need to worry about losing sales to file sharing.
Re:Electronica as a whole can benefit
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well, you *could* of course try to find some non-goth/death/I hate everyone electronica yourself. It's not exactly rare, you know. Pay a visit to a good record store near you that imports European electronica. I dare say you'll be in for a little surprise.
In fact, in the US (I'm assuming you're in the US on the basis of what you say - no European would ever make the statement you did), Nothing records (of NIN fame) does quite a good job releasing the more popular Warp-esque artists.
You could also fire up Audio Galaxy and download tracks by (off the top of my head) Plaid, Squarepusher, Wagonchrist, Jaga Jazzist, Kim Hiorthoy, Tipper, Four Tet, Akufen, Daedelus, Andrew Pekler, Pole, To Rococo Rot, Pan American, EU, Arovane, Mouse on Mars, etc, etc (this list is completely random - pls don't flame me for leaving out your favorite artist).
Just to get you started.
Re:My computer's fan sounds louder.
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 2
Aahh... but what you *really* want to do is open vmlinuz in an audio editor (in 'raw pcm' mode) and snip the best bits from it to work into a composition using a regular sample sequencer. Or maybe some kernel modules. The USB module, for instance, sounds fairly pleasing but it has a certain crude, unpolished feel to it that reminds one of early punk records. *Very* nice.
This is bullshit
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This music has been around for quite some time. For a short while two years ago, it was called 'glitch' and it was the 'in' thing of the week - heck, 'Clicks and Cuts 2' got reviewed in Playboy magazine.
It got to the point were everyone and their third rate techno musician was spicing up tracks with 'lowercase' sounds.
Before the 'glitch' revolution, there was already a large scene of musicians who used computers to create tracks out of supposedly non-musical sounds. They were called 'experimental musicians', 'soundscapists' or 'musique concrete people'.
It's nice to see Wired drawing some attention to these guys, but it's hardly new and I also dare say the scene of people who like this kind of stuff is quite a bit larger than '10.000 people world wide'.
True. Hoshi's fiddling with the universal translator really made me think about that piece of equipment we've been taking for granted in previous Star Treks.
Seems my university syntax and phonology courses weren't *that* useless after all...
The way I see it: suppose Chomsky's Universal Syntax turns out to be not innate to human brain structure, but to the very essence of communication. Meaning: if you're going to communicate something, all the forms you're going to be able to do it in will conform to a fairly basic set of ground rules and all the intricacies of natural languages are simply icing on the cake, as it were. If you figure out what that Universal Syntax is (sorry, I forgot the exact term he used - it's been a while, and my university education was in Dutch), you can feed that into a computer and teach it to reduce all phonemes from a given language to it. Then you can have the computer expand the basic message back into coherent communication in another language using the same basic rules.
It's late. And when it's late, this is the kind of stupid stuff I think about.
Yeah, I know SuSE is *supposed* to be standards compliant in some way, and for lots of things./configure scripts work just fine. However, I'm trying to get the audio production thing going on it, and that means installing all sorts of non-standards compliant applications.
mplayer, xine, gnupg and gaim, popular apps such as these present no problem at all. It's things like SpiralSynthModular, PD, Canoscan drivers that take an inordinate amount of fiddling to get working.
If Red Hat proves not to be the solution to the 'nothing compiles the way it should' problem, I'll at least have gained some experience working with a distro I have very little experience with.
I've been very happy with SuSE as well - it's very beginner friendly.
Unfortunately, once you start looking at installing stuff that *didn't* come with the distro, it gets ver ugly very fast. Apparently, they've got a non-standard layout that many./configure scripts choke on.
Hopefully this standardization effort (which I've yet to read the details about - it's/.-ed) will put an end to this.
Although I must say it's too late for me - I'm downloading Red Hat ISOs now, hopefully Red Hat will be a bit more usable.
Audiogalaxy is, as they say, da shit: contrary to your claim you *can* get a lot of music on it, just not of the regular, mainstream RIAA crap variety. So I don't see why the RIAA is trying to sue them: their songs are already banned! Sure, some users give creative names to their files to bypass the system, but that can't be worrisome - a creative name means the file won't be found.
Perhaps they're afraid AudioGalaxy is turning RIAA listening folks into indie heads? There's a ton of obscure electronica on AudioGalaxy ready for the taking. Get hooked on that and you'll never be buying a Sony CD again (interestingly enough, btw, even somewhat mainstream electronica, such as Aphex Twin, is banned).
I just read through that list, and I can't say I've ever experienced *any* of these bugs, Linux or Windows. So I suppose they only occur under special circumstances. I've been using Mozilla as my main browser since.9.9. and it's been a smooth ride all the way
If the contractor GPLs the code, then he's required to provide the buyer a written offer for the source code, free of charge. This isn't a big deal, since the buyer ought to have access to the code anyway.
*If* what you say is true, then what would be the point of GPL-ing it? The customer, after all, has access to/owns (according to your statement) the source code anyway, so should the original developer be unavailable, they can take it to whomever they want to after they've 'bought' it anyways.
That said, I doubt if what you're saying is true. I know for a fact that the company I worked at a few years back developed custom applications for clients, but to the best of my knowledge these customers were never provided with the source (which would've been useless to them anyways), just with a (hopefully) working binary. Now this was in the Netherlands (yes, the country where fanatic lefties shoot insane right-wingers, yadda-yadda) and things may be different in the US or wherever you're from, but if they are in this respect, I really can't see why.
Dunno, it makes perfect sense to me. I'm no OSS zealot by a long shot (I personally have no need for software source as I can't make head nor tails of it anyways - usually), but I can't understand why governments aren't using OSS instead of handing over control of public documents/processes to a commercial entity. I'm really glad the Germans are starting to realize this and I hope the rest of the EU follows their example.
Slashdot Mirror
OSX is a particularly crappy performer, unless apps are specifically written to take advantage of it.
Windows XP may be slow(ish), but it's a damn sight faster for real time computing than Linux (except, possibly, Linux-with-Alan-Cox's-low-latency-kernel). The price you pay for stability, I suppose.
Nope, Steinberg won't do Linux because they feel Linux isn't able to deliver the performance they want. Before you start yapping 'low latency kernel', consider the direction Steinberg's been taking off late, with VST, VST2 and now VST System Link, not to mention their ASIO standard that aims to whack latency down to almost nothing: Steinberg is interested in real-time computing. Linux may be good for a lot of things, but real time virtual studio work isn't one of them.
BTW, claiming that Steinberg is 'moving towards a hardware based solution in the future' is pure FUD and has no basis in reality whatsoever. Steinberg is, after all, the company, that continually thinks up new standards and protocols for making studio work on a computer a better experience. Oh, and just for the record, no, I don't work for them, nor do I own any of their software as I can't afford it.
Until the software's written, there's no point in making a distro to pretend that it is
True. However, we've recently seen it *is* possible to use *nix for pro audio, provided you tailor your *nix of choice specifically for the purpose. Apple did endless tweaking to theirs and right now, if you use apps that were specifically written for it, such as Ableton Live, OSX is quite a stellar performer.
Whether any software company is actually going to take the trouble to write for Linux is a different matter entirely, but I'd sure like to have PD run on something that performs a little better than vanilla Linux.
Unfortunately for Apple, they're likely to turn away knowledgable users with those ads.
I don't think Apple is after knowledgable users. Knowledgable users appreciate strength in numbers - if you use the same setup as a whole lot of other people, you're more likely to find someone, either in real life or on the net, who's dealt with some of the problems you're facing.
This, to me at least, is what makes Linux such a dream to use - because 99% of its users are tech-savvy and net-connected, a quick google will usually help you out when you're stuck. It works for Windows too, but only because of the sheer number of Windows users. Try feeding obscure Mac problems to groups.google.com.
electronica (crappy american term btw)
Actually, I like the term. That is to say, I've always interpreted it to mean 'anything that's done on a computer'. Plus, probably, some synths and samplers, though that's by no means necessary.
It's a neutral term that doesn't tell you anything about the music it describes except from how it was made, which is good, IMHO.
I vastly prefer it over things like 'post-minimalist soundscape techno', 'retro-rave-intelligent-dance-music' or crap like that.
- Aphex Twin: freaky beatfuckery. If you like this, move on to stuff released on Warp Records, Rephlex Records, Planet Mu, Skam, etc
- Ritchie Hawtin's "Concept": fairly accessible minimal techno. If you like this, it's time to move to Germany
;-). Anything on Mille Plateaux/Force Inc will be worth exploring next. - Four Tet: organic instrumental music that just so happens to be made on a computer. Not very beat heavy. Like this? Then get yourself a stack of records released on Domino, Morr Music, the Leaf label, etc.etc.
- Luke Vibert aka Wagonchrist hilariously cocky hiphop-esque sampling fests. Bits taken from old easytune records, some jazz, some downright weird stuff that's guaranteed to put a cheeky smirk on your face. If you find this amusing, you'll like a lot of what comes out on Ninja Tune.
- Kit Clayton somewhere between Aphex Twin and Ritchie Hawtin, it's techno that keeps your brain occupied while your ass is bouncing on the dancefloor. Again Mille Plateaux/Force Inc will have stuff you'll like, but Shitkatapult 's pretty good for this as well, as is Kompakt. Not to mention a veritable army of American boys with powerbooks.
For more commercially viable electronics, there's quite a few pointers elsewhere on this page.just push your mail providers to install a virus scanner on ther mailer daemon side..
Not necessarily something a provider wants to do. For starters, scanning thousands upon thousands of incoming e-mails puts a heavy strain on the servers. More importantly, however, is that by doing so a provider implicitly admits legal responsibility for what their users are doing on their systems. If you can read through users' e-mails to determine if they're infected with a virus, Big Bad Government is going to come in to ask you to scan for evidence of illegal actions as well.
For this reason, my employer has, for now, decided to forego server side virus scanning, and I pretty much would agree with him.
There was this product awhile back that was kind of an integrated low-level sound synth and sequencer/drum machine for the normal, 4-color gameboy. It was only available in europe, and you could make these REALLY funky tiny little techno tunes on it. Very aphexy. Does anyone remember the name of this, or have a link?
I think you're referring to Nanoloop, which can be found here.
Let's see - suppose I'd build my own content management system in php. What would I call the page where site admins get to do their admining?
...
Ok. Now I need a name for the page that contains the backend. "stuffrunningasabackend.php"? Nah
Best make my system modular - saves so much trouble when I'm trying to fix something afterwards. Let's see, what do I need for that....
Do you have any idea how many php content management thingies are out there, some of which are indeed offshoots of phpNuke (which is considered to be unsafe as hell, which is why there's so many alternatives)?
Nope:
Site Designed and Powered by Universal Networks(TM) Web Site Solutions(TM).
These content management thingies all look the same anyhow.
Bollocks^2
KPNQwest *is* down. My host, which turns out to buy its bandwidth from KPNQwest, was forced to move all of their servers to a different farm in another part of NL last night.
One of the coolest Einstuerzende Neubauten tracks featured them flicking the master power switch of their studio on and off.
Awesome.
I was most definitely *not* referring to IDM (that has to be the worst, most conceited and downright stupid name to be given to a genre of music ever).
'Clicks and Cuts', 'Micromusic' or whatever the hell has more in common with techno. In fact, I personally call it 'experimental techno', for good reason, too. Check out some stuff by Taylor Deupree (mentioned in the article) for instance, that's techno with Cool Sounds (tm).
A quick history lesson: apart from musique concrete and its offspring, in 1999-2000 there was a subgenre of techno called 'heroin house', on labels like Chain Reaction (a Basic Channel offshoot) that, also in fact, put out the first releases by people like Vladislav Delay, who later got lumped in with the glitch crowd, then, when he did a cheeky house-ish album, with 'microhouse'.
At the same time, there was a strong 'experimental electronics' scene, with imprints such as Raster-Noton (home of the only true glitch meister Carsten 'alva.noto' Nicolai) that started to take pointers from popular dance music. Some clever Wire journalist then figured these two movements ('experimental techno' and 'experimental electronics') yielded similar sounding result and called the 'movement' Glitch.
Over in the US, a similar convergence between academic experimentalism and techno was produced by people like Taylor Deupree, Kit Clayton and Sutekh.
None of this has anything to do with IDM. In fact, most of my IDM loving friends *hate* this experimental electronica, because to them it's boring and repetitive (to me, IDM is convoluted and tiring, but then that's just me).
Anyway, this is a rant. Mod me as such. The point is, I wasn't referring to IDM at all.
I know you're joking, but ....
These tracks, like all 'noisy' tracks, compress like shit, actually. MP3 encoders completely destroys them, as (I'm guessing) they figure it's unwanted noise or something. Even at 256k, some 'glitch', 'micromusic', 'lowercase' or whatever the hell it's called today, gets mangled beyond repair.
Which is just one reason why experimental musicians don't need to worry about losing sales to file sharing.
Well, you *could* of course try to find some non-goth/death/I hate everyone electronica yourself. It's not exactly rare, you know. Pay a visit to a good record store near you that imports European electronica. I dare say you'll be in for a little surprise.
In fact, in the US (I'm assuming you're in the US on the basis of what you say - no European would ever make the statement you did), Nothing records (of NIN fame) does quite a good job releasing the more popular Warp-esque artists.
You could also fire up Audio Galaxy and download tracks by (off the top of my head) Plaid, Squarepusher, Wagonchrist, Jaga Jazzist, Kim Hiorthoy, Tipper, Four Tet, Akufen, Daedelus, Andrew Pekler, Pole, To Rococo Rot, Pan American, EU, Arovane, Mouse on Mars, etc, etc (this list is completely random - pls don't flame me for leaving out your favorite artist).
Just to get you started.
Aahh ... but what you *really* want to do is open vmlinuz in an audio editor (in 'raw pcm' mode) and snip the best bits from it to work into a composition using a regular sample sequencer. Or maybe some kernel modules. The USB module, for instance, sounds fairly pleasing but it has a certain crude, unpolished feel to it that reminds one of early punk records. *Very* nice.
This music has been around for quite some time. For a short while two years ago, it was called 'glitch' and it was the 'in' thing of the week - heck, 'Clicks and Cuts 2' got reviewed in Playboy magazine.
It got to the point were everyone and their third rate techno musician was spicing up tracks with 'lowercase' sounds.
Before the 'glitch' revolution, there was already a large scene of musicians who used computers to create tracks out of supposedly non-musical sounds. They were called 'experimental musicians', 'soundscapists' or 'musique concrete people'.
It's nice to see Wired drawing some attention to these guys, but it's hardly new and I also dare say the scene of people who like this kind of stuff is quite a bit larger than '10.000 people world wide'.
True. Hoshi's fiddling with the universal translator really made me think about that piece of equipment we've been taking for granted in previous Star Treks.
Seems my university syntax and phonology courses weren't *that* useless after all...
The way I see it: suppose Chomsky's Universal Syntax turns out to be not innate to human brain structure, but to the very essence of communication. Meaning: if you're going to communicate something, all the forms you're going to be able to do it in will conform to a fairly basic set of ground rules and all the intricacies of natural languages are simply icing on the cake, as it were. If you figure out what that Universal Syntax is (sorry, I forgot the exact term he used - it's been a while, and my university education was in Dutch), you can feed that into a computer and teach it to reduce all phonemes from a given language to it. Then you can have the computer expand the basic message back into coherent communication in another language using the same basic rules.
It's late. And when it's late, this is the kind of stupid stuff I think about.
Oh, and I don't think Hoshi's *that* cute.
Yeah, I know SuSE is *supposed* to be standards compliant in some way, and for lots of things ./configure scripts work just fine. However, I'm trying to get the audio production thing going on it, and that means installing all sorts of non-standards compliant applications.
mplayer, xine, gnupg and gaim, popular apps such as these present no problem at all. It's things like SpiralSynthModular, PD, Canoscan drivers that take an inordinate amount of fiddling to get working.
If Red Hat proves not to be the solution to the 'nothing compiles the way it should' problem, I'll at least have gained some experience working with a distro I have very little experience with.
I've been very happy with SuSE as well - it's very beginner friendly.
./configure scripts choke on.
/.-ed) will put an end to this.
Unfortunately, once you start looking at installing stuff that *didn't* come with the distro, it gets ver ugly very fast. Apparently, they've got a non-standard layout that many
Hopefully this standardization effort (which I've yet to read the details about - it's
Although I must say it's too late for me - I'm downloading Red Hat ISOs now, hopefully Red Hat will be a bit more usable.
Audiogalaxy is, as they say, da shit: contrary to your claim you *can* get a lot of music on it, just not of the regular, mainstream RIAA crap variety. So I don't see why the RIAA is trying to sue them: their songs are already banned! Sure, some users give creative names to their files to bypass the system, but that can't be worrisome - a creative name means the file won't be found.
Perhaps they're afraid AudioGalaxy is turning RIAA listening folks into indie heads? There's a ton of obscure electronica on AudioGalaxy ready for the taking. Get hooked on that and you'll never be buying a Sony CD again (interestingly enough, btw, even somewhat mainstream electronica, such as Aphex Twin, is banned).
I just read through that list, and I can't say I've ever experienced *any* of these bugs, Linux or Windows. So I suppose they only occur under special circumstances. I've been using Mozilla as my main browser since .9.9. and it's been a smooth ride all the way
If the contractor GPLs the code, then he's required to provide the buyer a written offer for the source code, free of charge. This isn't a big deal, since the buyer ought to have access to the code anyway.
*If* what you say is true, then what would be the point of GPL-ing it? The customer, after all, has access to/owns (according to your statement) the source code anyway, so should the original developer be unavailable, they can take it to whomever they want to after they've 'bought' it anyways.
That said, I doubt if what you're saying is true. I know for a fact that the company I worked at a few years back developed custom applications for clients, but to the best of my knowledge these customers were never provided with the source (which would've been useless to them anyways), just with a (hopefully) working binary. Now this was in the Netherlands (yes, the country where fanatic lefties shoot insane right-wingers, yadda-yadda) and things may be different in the US or wherever you're from, but if they are in this respect, I really can't see why.
Dunno, it makes perfect sense to me. I'm no OSS zealot by a long shot (I personally have no need for software source as I can't make head nor tails of it anyways - usually), but I can't understand why governments aren't using OSS instead of handing over control of public documents/processes to a commercial entity. I'm really glad the Germans are starting to realize this and I hope the rest of the EU follows their example.
I've seen this come up a few times in this thread, without, apparently, someone posting the obvious:
if you want to run an old DOS game on new PCs and it runs too fast, get moslo.