BTW, nowadays Windows seems to suck much less and so newer generations have much less hostility towards Microsoft — despite their remaining just as closed and anti-competitive as they were before.
Both Mac and Windows suck much less than they used to.
I'm convinced that Linux was instrumental in pushing MS and Apple to improve. Linux showed geeks that there was nothing inherent about the x86 platform that meant you had to put up without pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, dynamic reconfiguration (changing IP without a reboot!). These OS features even had tangible benefits in GUI world -- dragging a window while a movie played in it! Playing two movies at once! They'd show these things off to their Windows using friends, who would be impressed. That must have scared Microsoft. I'm sure that led to Windows 95, and the improvements made thereafter.
Windows had pre-emptive multitasking for years, while Apple stubbornly stuck with cooperative multitasking. There *were* errant Mac programs. There *were* Mac viruses. And if one program screwed up, it would take the whole system with it. My personal bete noir was Hypercard - forever killing the system, possibly due to malware.
Apple were pretty much forced to replace their kernel, by the fact that Windows (of all things) was beating them on stability and performance.
Linux never caught up in terms of desktop sheen and newbie-friendliness. But nonetheless, both Mac and Windows were forced to improve massively, by the threat of Linux's technical superiority at certain points in history.
Even if the year of the Linux desktop never comes, I can thank it for pushing Windows (which I have to use at work) towards a tolerable state.
Literally true, in that I would never use Photoshop because I'm not prepared to pay for it.
But GIMP has a markedly different user interface to Photoshop -- much more oriented towards context menus. So much so that Photoshop users trying it out would complain.
It's an image processing tool, so it's going to share a number of features - layers, masks, filters, brushes, etc. But it goes a lot further than cloning Photoshop.
I'm reasonably productive in GIMP. I'm totally lost in Photoshop.
I guess I think of polished/pretty as part of the same thing. I mean, I wasn't talking about those early Enlightenment X desktops that were works of art as screenshots, but barely usable in practice.
Want to install a OSX App? Drag it to your application folder.
People love this, don't they. The final step is admittedly neat - drag and drop, and it's done. But first you have to open a new Finder window, and navigate to Applications. It's entirely possible I've missed a shortcut or two -- I bet if I had eager Mac using friends they'd be keen to look over my shoulder and say 'hey did you know you could do all that with apple-command-shift-A' -- but it's always seemed clunky.
By comparison, run install.exe, click yes a few times. Done.
These aren't foaming-at-the-mouth RMS students. They're artists. They make music, or pictures. They produce a product; they don't stand around going "My mind must be FREEEEEEE and I need to produce music to save the world!" It's a hobby, that sometimes turns into a profitable career, with profit motive.
Remember what got RMS started. He thought "this print spooler is pretty neat, but it would be even neater if it had an extra feature (from memory, I think it was emailing the admins when there was a printer jam). So he asked for the source code, and was surprised and outraged when they said he couldn't have it.
Now, a really creative artist might be making music in Ableton Live on their Mac, and think to themselves "this sequencer is pretty neat, but it would be even neater if I could add this extra feature. Suddenly they're thinking like RMS.
One get-out clause that some non-free software has, is a plugin architecture. I'm given to understand that many of the things you might want Ableton Live, or Photoshop, etc. to do, you could achieve by writing a plugin, so you wouldn't need the source for the whole thing. But there are still fundamental modifications that you couldn't make, however much you wanted to.
[People] like Apple's products is because the user interface and the physical products are designed to, as they say, Just work.
I'd love a system like this. Windows ain't it. But Mac ain't it either. I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to do something in iLife and either:
The help documentation says "You can [do something]" without actually telling you how
Despite it seeming like an obvious thing to be able to do, extensive Googling eventually reveals it can't be done
The Mac way is often "Everything's really easy, as long as you only want to do the narrow range of things we wanted you to do".
This is equally true of the iPhone, although in a way I can forgive it more on the iPhone - with its small form factor and lack of inputs, you'd expect it to be a less open-ended appliance.
Yes, some portions of OS X are derived from OSS. The GNU userland that almost no mac users use, and portions of the extremely heavily modified userland and base libraries and a few services such as printing.
Those add up though. More significantly, every time a Mac user runs two processes at once, they're using the preemptive multitasking that was missing from MacOS 9, and was fixed by moving wholesale to a FOSS kernel. Every IP packet goes via a FOSS TCP stack. The pretty GUI would be useless without these foundations.
pretending that Apple is standing on the shoulders of OSS is retarded unless you want to claim that OSS Unix like OSes are standing on the shoulders of Bell labs
It would be ridiculous not to acknowledge that Linux, FreeBSD etc. stand on the shoulders of Bell Labs.
(It's almost like seeing a group of people whose passion is hand-made papermaking criticizing composers for writing on store-bought paper, when much better paper is available. But the composers don't actually care about what paper they use.)
Except that in this case said composers won't shut up about the Apple paper they use.
Perhaps fans of Apple products consider usability and "Just Works" to be an Essential Software Freedom and likewise consider any software with a bad UI that requires lots of fiddling to work to be "closed" to them.
Of course, one would have to be a free thinker to accept such a heretical idea.
This is what the author of TFA does not understand about RMS.
RMS would rather something slightly shabby, but free, than to be imprisoned in a beautiful gilded cage.
Apple lovers are happy not to be free, as long it's pretty. It's like Brave New World.
The programs people are inspired to write for the Mac OS X operating system are routinely more elegant and useful and less annoying than their Windows counterparts.
Quite the claim! Yet there are no examples.
I own a Mac. I've not installed much extra software on it. But what I have installed appears very similar to its Windows equivalent.
So can anyone give an example of what he's talking about?
I guess iLife should be showcase software for Mac.
- iPhoto is a confusing mess compared to Picasa
- GarageBand has some pretty neat amp simulation software in it. But the UI is the opposite of intuitive.
- iTunes is clumsy and inconsistent. I've been using it for over 5 years on Windows and Mac, and it still throws me curveballs.
- I once put together a slideshow in iMovie. I still don't know what was going on.
- iDVD is pretty easy to use. But that's because it's basically a wizard.
Love it or hate it, it will inherit XP, and by such, it will support H.264. This would solve a huge slice of their problem which would only get smaller as Windows 7 adoption increases.
You misunderstand what their "problem" is, even though you quote it in your post. It's not that they would have difficulty supporting H264. It's that their raison d'etre is to promote a free and open Web.
They don't want or need to kill off H264, since HTML5 makes it easy for a site to support both at once. With this you end up with the equitable solution where you can say "If you want to use a browser with a proprietary codec, you can. Maybe it'll even look better. But if your browser only uses free codecs, you're OK too.
They just want to promote a Web where a user without access to H264 can take part in a meaningful way. So, a child in India/Brazil/Namibia/etc. who can't afford an H264 license (nor a Windows license) can still view mainstream video sites. So the same kid can create videos and share them on the Web.
If they didn't pursue those ideals, they might as well pack it in today and let everyone use IE.
Otherwise sites will just push other browsers which do implement H264, or will use plugins like Silverlight / Flash to render the content anyway in Firefox.
Two mutually exclusive scenarios here: Scenario 1: HTML5 does not provide a better user experience than Flash. (yeah, right) In which case, why are we worrying. Sites will continue to use Flash. Everyone is happy.
Scenario 2: HTML5 provides a better user experience than Flash So, sites will find that their users are demanding HTML5 video instead of Flash. Now, what's the easiest and least alienating to customers: (a) Tell customers "OK, here's your HTML5 video. But if you're using Firefox, go and get another browser." (b) Dual encoding to both Theora and H.264. Delta cost: just the storage.
If it was my commercial site, I'd do (b). I'd also be crossing my fingers that one day the browser landscape would let me just use Theora, so I could stop paying these pesky license fees for encoding and transmitting H.264.
They probably won't come after you, since you're small fry.
If, however, you were serving an appreciable amount of H.264 video on the web, they'd come after you asking for thousands, or tens of thousands, or millions.
You could try your civil disobedience trick. You'd have your day in court, lose, and owe them even more.
I guess you weren't around during the Netscape years, when MS and Netscape were busy inventing their own ad-hoc and non-interoperable HTML tags with abandon.
Suggestion: consider that spelling conventions vary among English speaking countries. "Transferrable" is unconventional, but appears in dictionaries. "Licence" is the standard British spelling.
That's rather defeatist. It could happen. It would need to happen in stages. Each stage is a win in itself.
1. It becomes common practice for sites to host both H.264 and Theora. (HTML5 lets you specify multiple video URLS. The browser will pick the one it prefers. You can do fallback-to-Flash in Javascript)
2. Some sites start using Theora only. Either for ideological reasons, or because it's simply all they can afford. Their fallback is a message saying "sorry, please use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc."
3. People start complaining to their vendors about this content they can't view -- "how come Firefox can do this and my browser can't?". Under commercial pressure, these vendors start to support Theora.
If Firefox folds on this issue, then even step 1 won't happen. God bless 'em for having principles.
It is not impossible for Mozilla to use h.264. They have several options for how to use it.
But all of them conflict with the Mozilla Foundation's mission, to provide a 100% free web browsing stack, and to encourage a Web that can be fully experienced using that.
From TFA:
We want to make sure that the Web experience is good for all users, present and future. I want to make sure that when a child in India or Brazil or Kenya discovers the internet, there isn’t a big piece of it (video) that they can’t afford to participate in. I want to make sure that there are no toll-booth barriers to entry for someone building a whole new browser, or bringing a browser to a whole new device or OS, or making and using tools for creating standard web content. And I want that not only altruistically, but also because I want the crazy awesome video (animation, peer-to-peer, security, etc.) ideas that will come from having more people, with more perspectives, fully participating in the internet. The web is undeniably better for Mozilla having entered the browser market, and it would have been impossible for us to do so if there had been a multi-million-dollar licensing fee required for handling HTML, CSS, JavaScript or the like.
The thing is, both iTunes and Quicktime are stable and usable on Macs (no surprises there). Most Apple fanboys won't have experienced it on Windows.
They'd doubtless assume the problems are somehow Windows' fault...
The reality is that I think both are based on Mac-targeted source code, and work via a compatibility layer written by Apple. This adds some inefficiencies to what the code has to do. It also means they have Mac UI traits, that Windows users don't know what to do with.
As for Canonical, or anyone else, who might fear liability for distributing a binary, they can run a simple script to do the compiling on the end user's machine.
... which would not work around the licensing issues in any way.
You have to pay MPEG LA for licensing the patents, whether the code is shipped as source or binary. It makes not a jot of difference.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, nowadays Windows seems to suck much less and so newer generations have much less hostility towards Microsoft — despite their remaining just as closed and anti-competitive as they were before.
Both Mac and Windows suck much less than they used to.
I'm convinced that Linux was instrumental in pushing MS and Apple to improve. Linux showed geeks that there was nothing inherent about the x86 platform that meant you had to put up without pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, dynamic reconfiguration (changing IP without a reboot!). These OS features even had tangible benefits in GUI world -- dragging a window while a movie played in it! Playing two movies at once! They'd show these things off to their Windows using friends, who would be impressed. That must have scared Microsoft. I'm sure that led to Windows 95, and the improvements made thereafter.
Windows had pre-emptive multitasking for years, while Apple stubbornly stuck with cooperative multitasking. There *were* errant Mac programs. There *were* Mac viruses. And if one program screwed up, it would take the whole system with it. My personal bete noir was Hypercard - forever killing the system, possibly due to malware.
Apple were pretty much forced to replace their kernel, by the fact that Windows (of all things) was beating them on stability and performance.
Linux never caught up in terms of desktop sheen and newbie-friendliness. But nonetheless, both Mac and Windows were forced to improve massively, by the threat of Linux's technical superiority at certain points in history.
Even if the year of the Linux desktop never comes, I can thank it for pushing Windows (which I have to use at work) towards a tolerable state.
I'll give you that TextMate looks very good. But then at $50 - for a text editor it had better be.
I mean that's $50 more than every other text editor I've ever used.
Gimp is a poor man's Photoshop.
Literally true, in that I would never use Photoshop because I'm not prepared to pay for it.
But GIMP has a markedly different user interface to Photoshop -- much more oriented towards context menus. So much so that Photoshop users trying it out would complain.
It's an image processing tool, so it's going to share a number of features - layers, masks, filters, brushes, etc. But it goes a lot further than cloning Photoshop.
I'm reasonably productive in GIMP. I'm totally lost in Photoshop.
I guess I think of polished/pretty as part of the same thing. I mean, I wasn't talking about those early Enlightenment X desktops that were works of art as screenshots, but barely usable in practice.
Want to install a OSX App? Drag it to your application folder.
People love this, don't they. The final step is admittedly neat - drag and drop, and it's done. But first you have to open a new Finder window, and navigate to Applications. It's entirely possible I've missed a shortcut or two -- I bet if I had eager Mac using friends they'd be keen to look over my shoulder and say 'hey did you know you could do all that with apple-command-shift-A' -- but it's always seemed clunky.
By comparison, run install.exe, click yes a few times. Done.
Or "apt-get install somepackage" :)
These aren't foaming-at-the-mouth RMS students. They're artists. They make music, or pictures. They produce a product; they don't stand around going "My mind must be FREEEEEEE and I need to produce music to save the world!" It's a hobby, that sometimes turns into a profitable career, with profit motive.
Remember what got RMS started. He thought "this print spooler is pretty neat, but it would be even neater if it had an extra feature (from memory, I think it was emailing the admins when there was a printer jam). So he asked for the source code, and was surprised and outraged when they said he couldn't have it.
Now, a really creative artist might be making music in Ableton Live on their Mac, and think to themselves "this sequencer is pretty neat, but it would be even neater if I could add this extra feature. Suddenly they're thinking like RMS.
One get-out clause that some non-free software has, is a plugin architecture. I'm given to understand that many of the things you might want Ableton Live, or Photoshop, etc. to do, you could achieve by writing a plugin, so you wouldn't need the source for the whole thing. But there are still fundamental modifications that you couldn't make, however much you wanted to.
[People] like Apple's products is because the user interface and the physical products are designed to, as they say, Just work.
I'd love a system like this. Windows ain't it. But Mac ain't it either. I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to do something in iLife and either:
The Mac way is often "Everything's really easy, as long as you only want to do the narrow range of things we wanted you to do".
This is equally true of the iPhone, although in a way I can forgive it more on the iPhone - with its small form factor and lack of inputs, you'd expect it to be a less open-ended appliance.
An excellent track pad, not a track nipple
It's a matter of preference. I must have a mouse nipple - I can't get on with trackpads at all.
In fact, if I'd been considering a MacBook, that might just be the dealbreaker.
Yes, some portions of OS X are derived from OSS. The GNU userland that almost no mac users use, and portions of the extremely heavily modified userland and base libraries and a few services such as printing.
Those add up though. More significantly, every time a Mac user runs two processes at once, they're using the preemptive multitasking that was missing from MacOS 9, and was fixed by moving wholesale to a FOSS kernel. Every IP packet goes via a FOSS TCP stack. The pretty GUI would be useless without these foundations.
pretending that Apple is standing on the shoulders of OSS is retarded unless you want to claim that OSS Unix like OSes are standing on the shoulders of Bell labs
It would be ridiculous not to acknowledge that Linux, FreeBSD etc. stand on the shoulders of Bell Labs.
(It's almost like seeing a group of people whose passion is hand-made papermaking criticizing composers for writing on store-bought paper, when much better paper is available. But the composers don't actually care about what paper they use.)
Except that in this case said composers won't shut up about the Apple paper they use.
Perhaps fans of Apple products consider usability and "Just Works" to be an Essential Software Freedom and likewise consider any software with a bad UI that requires lots of fiddling to work to be "closed" to them.
Of course, one would have to be a free thinker to accept such a heretical idea.
This is what the author of TFA does not understand about RMS.
RMS would rather something slightly shabby, but free, than to be imprisoned in a beautiful gilded cage.
Apple lovers are happy not to be free, as long it's pretty. It's like Brave New World.
... and Safari is a pretty thin wrapper around WebKit.
OSS's "remotely useful" contributions just keep cropping up.
From TFA:
The programs people are inspired to write for the Mac OS X operating system are routinely more elegant and useful and less annoying than their Windows counterparts.
Quite the claim! Yet there are no examples.
I own a Mac. I've not installed much extra software on it. But what I have installed appears very similar to its Windows equivalent.
So can anyone give an example of what he's talking about?
I guess iLife should be showcase software for Mac.
- iPhoto is a confusing mess compared to Picasa
- GarageBand has some pretty neat amp simulation software in it. But the UI is the opposite of intuitive.
- iTunes is clumsy and inconsistent. I've been using it for over 5 years on Windows and Mac, and it still throws me curveballs.
- I once put together a slideshow in iMovie. I still don't know what was going on.
- iDVD is pretty easy to use. But that's because it's basically a wizard.
Love it or hate it, it will inherit XP, and by such, it will support H.264. This would solve a huge slice of their problem which would only get smaller as Windows 7 adoption increases.
You misunderstand what their "problem" is, even though you quote it in your post. It's not that they would have difficulty supporting H264. It's that their raison d'etre is to promote a free and open Web.
They don't want or need to kill off H264, since HTML5 makes it easy for a site to support both at once. With this you end up with the equitable solution where you can say "If you want to use a browser with a proprietary codec, you can. Maybe it'll even look better. But if your browser only uses free codecs, you're OK too.
They just want to promote a Web where a user without access to H264 can take part in a meaningful way. So, a child in India/Brazil/Namibia/etc. who can't afford an H264 license (nor a Windows license) can still view mainstream video sites. So the same kid can create videos and share them on the Web.
If they didn't pursue those ideals, they might as well pack it in today and let everyone use IE.
Xiph, at least, would question the assertion that H264 has a better compression ratio.
It's an assertion that's repeated so often, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that maybe it's not true.
Otherwise sites will just push other browsers which do implement H264, or will use plugins like Silverlight / Flash to render the content anyway in Firefox.
Two mutually exclusive scenarios here:
Scenario 1: HTML5 does not provide a better user experience than Flash. (yeah, right)
In which case, why are we worrying. Sites will continue to use Flash. Everyone is happy.
Scenario 2: HTML5 provides a better user experience than Flash
So, sites will find that their users are demanding HTML5 video instead of Flash.
Now, what's the easiest and least alienating to customers:
(a) Tell customers "OK, here's your HTML5 video. But if you're using Firefox, go and get another browser."
(b) Dual encoding to both Theora and H.264. Delta cost: just the storage.
If it was my commercial site, I'd do (b). I'd also be crossing my fingers that one day the browser landscape would let me just use Theora, so I could stop paying these pesky license fees for encoding and transmitting H.264.
They probably won't come after you, since you're small fry.
If, however, you were serving an appreciable amount of H.264 video on the web, they'd come after you asking for thousands, or tens of thousands, or millions.
You could try your civil disobedience trick. You'd have your day in court, lose, and owe them even more.
I guess you weren't around during the Netscape years, when MS and Netscape were busy inventing their own ad-hoc and non-interoperable HTML tags with abandon.
It was *horrible*.
Aha, you seem to be suggesting that Firefox introduces in-browser ads.
Suggestion: consider that spelling conventions vary among English speaking countries. "Transferrable" is unconventional, but appears in dictionaries. "Licence" is the standard British spelling.
That's rather defeatist. It could happen. It would need to happen in stages. Each stage is a win in itself.
1. It becomes common practice for sites to host both H.264 and Theora. (HTML5 lets you specify multiple video URLS. The browser will pick the one it prefers. You can do fallback-to-Flash in Javascript)
2. Some sites start using Theora only. Either for ideological reasons, or because it's simply all they can afford. Their fallback is a message saying "sorry, please use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc."
3. People start complaining to their vendors about this content they can't view -- "how come Firefox can do this and my browser can't?". Under commercial pressure, these vendors start to support Theora.
If Firefox folds on this issue, then even step 1 won't happen. God bless 'em for having principles.
It is not impossible for Mozilla to use h.264. They have several options for how to use it.
But all of them conflict with the Mozilla Foundation's mission, to provide a 100% free web browsing stack, and to encourage a Web that can be fully experienced using that.
From TFA:
We want to make sure that the Web experience is good for all users, present and future. I want to make sure that when a child in India or Brazil or Kenya discovers the internet, there isn’t a big piece of it (video) that they can’t afford to participate in. I want to make sure that there are no toll-booth barriers to entry for someone building a whole new browser, or bringing a browser to a whole new device or OS, or making and using tools for creating standard web content. And I want that not only altruistically, but also because I want the crazy awesome video (animation, peer-to-peer, security, etc.) ideas that will come from having more people, with more perspectives, fully participating in the internet. The web is undeniably better for Mozilla having entered the browser market, and it would have been impossible for us to do so if there had been a multi-million-dollar licensing fee required for handling HTML, CSS, JavaScript or the like.
Windows works a lot better without Apple applications on it.
Deliberate sabotage? Or just incompetence?
The thing is, both iTunes and Quicktime are stable and usable on Macs (no surprises there). Most Apple fanboys won't have experienced it on Windows.
They'd doubtless assume the problems are somehow Windows' fault...
The reality is that I think both are based on Mac-targeted source code, and work via a compatibility layer written by Apple. This adds some inefficiencies to what the code has to do. It also means they have Mac UI traits, that Windows users don't know what to do with.
As for Canonical, or anyone else, who might fear liability for distributing a binary, they can run a simple script to do the compiling on the end user's machine.
... which would not work around the licensing issues in any way.
You have to pay MPEG LA for licensing the patents, whether the code is shipped as source or binary. It makes not a jot of difference.
Surely if Google/Apple were to make the right noises, the chip manufacturers of the world would provide Theora acceleration in a heartbeat.
You could sell a lot of chips if you were picked to be part of the next iPhone, the next Google phone, or part of Google's transcoding platform.