If the open-source driver lacks support for hardware features that the closed-source driver supports, it will not get support for those features. Unless someone reverse-engineers those features in a way that is legal in all the places where the drivers would need to be distributed, which is usually a major effort that could have been avoided if the vendor saw the light. And if the vendor didn't do a full source release in the first place, they may well sue the person who did the reverse engineering, even if he did everything legally. Basically, having to reverse engineer features is a huge PITA.
It's not a loophole in the QPL. The problem is that the QPL is not compatible with the GPL. Code under the GPL that is compiled/linked with QPL code can't legally be distributed. The reason is that the GPL requires that the whole work (in this case the GPL'd code plus QT) be redistributable under the terms of the GPL. The QPL does not permit distribution of modified versions of the software, only distribution of the modifications in a separate form (patches etc), whereas the GPL does allow redistribution of modified version of the software. Since the whole work cannot be distributed under the terms of the GPL, it cannot be distributed at all. The fact that noone is enforcing it does not make it any less illegal.
Emacs can do this. Currently there is support for editing C, C++, elisp, Perl, Tcl, Python, Scheme, Common Lisp, ML, Haskell, Ada, Fortran, TeX, awk, Java, and many more languages. It also supports gdb and ddd for debugging, CVS or RCS for version management. It can run make (or some other build system) and parse error output well enough to let you easily jump to the error. It has support for ctags, etags and cscope for searching for definitions in a number of languages, and there is also the speedbar for browsing source files. The OO-browser is a Smalltalk-like class browser for (X)Emacs. Integration with Common Lisp systems is excellent. Etc. I could go on, but I think I've made my point, namely that whatever you need, Emacs either does it or can be made to do it.:) Unless you don't have enough memory or fast enough CPU, in which case something else might be a better idea...
Suppose Lionhead licenses the Black&White engine under the GPL. Now anyone can modify the engine, and distribute their modifications to others. But only if they include the source to their modifications, and license them to the recipients under the GPL. If the licensee wants to close up their modified engine, they would need to get a separate license from Lionhead, and Lionhead could ask for royalties. Whether this would work depends entirely on how intent on closing their engine modifications potential licensees are, and how much they trust the GPL. Note: I'm not saying the GPL is the only option, I'm just using it as an example. Another note: I'm not saying you shouldn't trust the GPL, but it is still untested in court, and when your product is on the line, being certain you have the right to use third-party code can be worth a lot of money.
Sony, Sega and Nintendo do not make profits selling the consoles. They lose money on them. Their profits come from licensing development toolkits to developers. Freeing the development toolkits would be a very bad move if they want to make a profit.
Look at Crystal Space. It's an LGPL'd 3D engine, which means you can use it in any software as long as you release all the changes you've made to Crystal Space under the LGPL. It's also very much cross platform, supporting Linux, general Unix, Windows, Windows NT, OS/2, BeOS, NextStep, OpenStep, MacOS/X Server, DOS, and Macintosh, using OpenGL, Direct3D, or software rendering.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is available on Windows, Linux and I think Mac. I'm not sure if it will interoperate between Windows and the others though, depends on whether it uses DirectPlay or not. Railroad Tycoon 2 should interoperate between the Mac and Linux versions, at least once Loki and whoever did the Mac port get around to it. Empire is available on just about any conceivable platform. FreeCiv runs on Unix-likes, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, but doesn't seem to be available for Mac. Unreal Tournament is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Those are the ones I can think of right now.
Trade secrets have very limited legal protection compared to copyrights or patents. As I understand it, as long as you haven't actually had access to the secret information, you can divulge it all you want. So reverse engineering would be perfectly legal. That's why there are both trade secrets and patents. With a patent, you get protection for a limited time. With a trade secret, the protection lasts until someone figures the secret out (as opposed to ferreting it out). I am not a lawyer. I do not actually know American law. This is just a bunch of uneducated guesses.
Does MacOS let you use those screens as one logical screen? Multiple screens with multiple sizes and color depths are supported (in various ways), they're just not as convenient as Xinerama.
If region coding was only about preventing viewing of films before they get to theaters, I wouldn't mind it so much. But if that was the reason, they wouldn't region lock 95+% of all old films on DVD. It's about being able to charge different prices in different parts of the world, or at least that's my guess. That (and the fact that non-region 1 DVDs are often worse quality than region 1 DVDs) is why people remove the region lock. It allows you to buy movies either cheaper, or that just aren't available in the region they are in. Enabling earlier releases in some parts of the world is just a convenient excuse that happens to hold a grain of truth.
I haven't played anything but Daggerfall, but I can comment on that.
Daggerfall isn't so much free as unfocused. There is a story, but instead of following it, you can wander around all over the world, and do whatever you feel like doing, as long as it's supported by the game (like you can't burn cities:( ). The problem is that, while the game is virtually unlimited in size, it has only a few basic quests to make up the plot outside the main plot. And all the dungeons are extremely similar. So in the end, you have to follow the main plot to get any variety. To make the rest of the game really good you would need to make sure the world actually moves on and develops, and you have to make the NPCs a lot more intelligent than they were in Daggerfall. Or you move it online.
The Java API would present no problem (it is included with the compiler), but these APIs are not included, you need to get them separately, which means the exception for things included with the compiler doesn't apply. Personally, I think it wouldn't violate the GPL to distribute just the source, but IANAL and people disagree with me on this quite often .
If Mozilla can cause ps to be killed by signal 11 (segmentation violation) then that means either ps or the kernel is buggy. Or possibly your hardware. Probably it is a lack of checking the return value of malloc combined with a memory leak in Mozilla that is causing you problems. It also means Mozilla is buggy, but we knew that already. It's not even alpha yet, of course it's buggy. It works pretty well for me, though.
If they don't make a quality product that is easy to use, why would people buy their product instead of Joebob's Easy Quality Linux, which is a quality, easy to use Linux? And if people don't buy their product, then why would they go to them for support, instead of Linuxcare or IBM? Even if they do intend to make most of their money from support, the distribution is what gets them the customers. If they had a monopoly, they might be able to get away with poor products, but when there is competition, you need to compete, or you lose.
I'm not going to get into this discussion, but the right to bear arms wasn't in the original constitution. It was added in the third (I think) amendment. The poster was talking about the original constitution. So it's the pro-gun people who should complain, not that anti-gun people.:-)
It's not a violation, as long as you provide the source. The GPL isn't very concerned with how the binaries look, just that you make sure the recipient can get the source under the GPL. How the executable is stored is up to you.
3DNow is floating point. It is, however, hampered in part by the FPU architecture, because it uses the FPU stack for it's registers, IIRC. That means that as soon as you need to do something that 3DNow doesn't do, things get messy. Or so I believe, I haven't looked closely enough at it to be certain of this. 3DNow also only supports single precision. I don't know what "guaranteed accuracy" means here. I seem to recall that the iterative square root and reciprocal algorithms can give you 23 bits of precision, though. This is all based on reading the 3DNow spec for the K6-2 a long time ago, so it might be wrong or it might not apply to the Athlon.
There is no "one true bottleneck" that limits computer speed. Some apps are limited by disk I/O. Some apps are limited by memory bus speed. Some are limited by network speed. Some are limited by level 2 cache speed. Others are limited by CPU speed. It all depends on the app. Very few games are limited by disk I/O. Very few static page web servers are limited by CPU speed (or so I would hope...). And so on.
Debian does that already. It's called UAE. It only emulates an A500, and there are some things that don't work, but hey! It's an Amiga on your PC! (Or Mac, or workstation or whatever)
I suspect most religions see it as worse to worship a false god than no god at all, so if any of those religions is right, but you don't know which one, atheism (or agnosticism) is the safest choice. It's not necessarily the best choice, though (even if you're unsure which god to believe in). See a discussion of Pascal's Wager (which argues that believing in God is the rational thing to do) if you're interested and haven't already. You can find one at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
You can bring up the menus with F10, but you can't select in them unless the thing you want to do has an accelerator key. That's annoying. Or am I just missing something?
I don't hate IE because it's from MS, I hate it because the interface sucks. Scrolling in IE is absolutely broken. That's a big enough deal to me that I use Opera instead in Windows, even though I dislike MDI interfaces. IEs UI is also ugly, but that I could live with (and there are ways to fix it, I suppose). And then there is IE on Solaris... Absolutely useless, it's really slow (and that's on a 440MHz Ultra10 with 256 megs of RAM) and really unstable. Netscape is much more usable. That's my experience with it, anyway. But then, I use Linux almost exclusively, so IE simply isn't an option.
Netscape was charging for commercial users until Microsoft started giving away an IE of comparable quality (I think it was IE4, because IE3 sucked far worse than any Netscape), at which point Navigator became very hard to sell. Navigator sales once represented about 40% of Netscape's revenues, so having to give it away was a major hit to their bottom line.
Ok, so US copyright law differs more from Swedish copyright law than I thought it did. But if I were to do that (in Sweden), I would hold copyright to the derivative work, and that might mean that I would also hold copyright to it in the rest of the countries that have signed and ratified the Berne convention. But I haven't actually read the Berne convention, so I'm not sure about that. Actually, there probably isn't much difference. I would only hold copyright to the work in the modified form. If you were to extract the original, I doubt my copyright would still apply. But that doesn't prevent me from distributing under the GPL, AFAICT, it just means that the GPL wouldn't be completely enforceable. You would have to use the GPL if you wanted to include any of the stuff I modified (like the license notices), but you could extract the original work and it would still be public domain. Whether that invalidates the whole license or not I don't know.
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If the open-source driver lacks support for hardware features that the closed-source driver supports, it will not get support for those features. Unless someone reverse-engineers those features in a way that is legal in all the places where the drivers would need to be distributed, which is usually a major effort that could have been avoided if the vendor saw the light.
And if the vendor didn't do a full source release in the first place, they may well sue the person who did the reverse engineering, even if he did everything legally. Basically, having to reverse engineer features is a huge PITA.
It's not a loophole in the QPL. The problem is that the QPL is not compatible with the GPL. Code under the GPL that is compiled/linked with QPL code can't legally be distributed.
The reason is that the GPL requires that the whole work (in this case the GPL'd code plus QT) be redistributable under the terms of the GPL. The QPL does not permit distribution of modified versions of the software, only distribution of the modifications in a separate form (patches etc), whereas the GPL does allow redistribution of modified version of the software. Since the whole work cannot be distributed under the terms of the GPL, it cannot be distributed at all.
The fact that noone is enforcing it does not make it any less illegal.
Emacs can do this. Currently there is support for editing C, C++, elisp, Perl, Tcl, Python, Scheme, Common Lisp, ML, Haskell, Ada, Fortran, TeX, awk, Java, and many more languages. It also supports gdb and ddd for debugging, CVS or RCS for version management. It can run make (or some other build system) and parse error output well enough to let you easily jump to the error. It has support for ctags, etags and cscope for searching for definitions in a number of languages, and there is also the speedbar for browsing source files. The OO-browser is a Smalltalk-like class browser for (X)Emacs. Integration with Common Lisp systems is excellent. Etc. :) Unless you don't have enough memory or fast enough CPU, in which case something else might be a better idea...
I could go on, but I think I've made my point, namely that whatever you need, Emacs either does it or can be made to do it.
Suppose Lionhead licenses the Black&White engine under the GPL. Now anyone can modify the engine, and distribute their modifications to others. But only if they include the source to their modifications, and license them to the recipients under the GPL.
If the licensee wants to close up their modified engine, they would need to get a separate license from Lionhead, and Lionhead could ask for royalties. Whether this would work depends entirely on how intent on closing their engine modifications potential licensees are, and how much they trust the GPL.
Note: I'm not saying the GPL is the only option, I'm just using it as an example.
Another note: I'm not saying you shouldn't trust the GPL, but it is still untested in court, and when your product is on the line, being certain you have the right to use third-party code can be worth a lot of money.
Sony, Sega and Nintendo do not make profits selling the consoles. They lose money on them. Their profits come from licensing development toolkits to developers. Freeing the development toolkits would be a very bad move if they want to make a profit.
The development systems run Linux (supposedly), and Linux is being ported to it (Wulfstation Cluster Project).
;)
And they should really be talking about it on Userfriendly. Shame on you, Iliad!
Look at Crystal Space. It's an LGPL'd 3D engine, which means you can use it in any software as long as you release all the changes you've made to Crystal Space under the LGPL. It's also very much cross platform, supporting Linux, general Unix, Windows, Windows NT, OS/2, BeOS, NextStep, OpenStep, MacOS/X Server, DOS, and Macintosh, using OpenGL, Direct3D, or software rendering.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is available on Windows, Linux and I think Mac. I'm not sure if it will interoperate between Windows and the others though, depends on whether it uses DirectPlay or not.
Railroad Tycoon 2 should interoperate between the Mac and Linux versions, at least once Loki and whoever did the Mac port get around to it.
Empire is available on just about any conceivable platform.
FreeCiv runs on Unix-likes, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, but doesn't seem to be available for Mac.
Unreal Tournament is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
Those are the ones I can think of right now.
Trade secrets have very limited legal protection compared to copyrights or patents. As I understand it, as long as you haven't actually had access to the secret information, you can divulge it all you want. So reverse engineering would be perfectly legal. That's why there are both trade secrets and patents. With a patent, you get protection for a limited time. With a trade secret, the protection lasts until someone figures the secret out (as opposed to ferreting it out).
I am not a lawyer. I do not actually know American law. This is just a bunch of uneducated guesses.
Does MacOS let you use those screens as one logical screen? Multiple screens with multiple sizes and color depths are supported (in various ways), they're just not as convenient as Xinerama.
If region coding was only about preventing viewing of films before they get to theaters, I wouldn't mind it so much. But if that was the reason, they wouldn't region lock 95+% of all old films on DVD. It's about being able to charge different prices in different parts of the world, or at least that's my guess. That (and the fact that non-region 1 DVDs are often worse quality than region 1 DVDs) is why people remove the region lock. It allows you to buy movies either cheaper, or that just aren't available in the region they are in.
Enabling earlier releases in some parts of the world is just a convenient excuse that happens to hold a grain of truth.
I haven't played anything but Daggerfall, but I can comment on that.
:( ). The problem is that, while the game is virtually unlimited in size, it has only a few basic quests to make up the plot outside the main plot. And all the dungeons are extremely similar. So in the end, you have to follow the main plot to get any variety.
Daggerfall isn't so much free as unfocused. There is a story, but instead of following it, you can wander around all over the world, and do whatever you feel like doing, as long as it's supported by the game (like you can't burn cities
To make the rest of the game really good you would need to make sure the world actually moves on and develops, and you have to make the NPCs a lot more intelligent than they were in Daggerfall. Or you move it online.
The Java API would present no problem (it is included with the compiler), but these APIs are not included, you need to get them separately, which means the exception for things included with the compiler doesn't apply. Personally, I think it wouldn't violate the GPL to distribute just the source, but IANAL and people disagree with me on this quite often .
If Mozilla can cause ps to be killed by signal 11 (segmentation violation) then that means either ps or the kernel is buggy. Or possibly your hardware. Probably it is a lack of checking the return value of malloc combined with a memory leak in Mozilla that is causing you problems.
It also means Mozilla is buggy, but we knew that already. It's not even alpha yet, of course it's buggy. It works pretty well for me, though.
If they don't make a quality product that is easy to use, why would people buy their product instead of Joebob's Easy Quality Linux, which is a quality, easy to use Linux? And if people don't buy their product, then why would they go to them for support, instead of Linuxcare or IBM? Even if they do intend to make most of their money from support, the distribution is what gets them the customers.
If they had a monopoly, they might be able to get away with poor products, but when there is competition, you need to compete, or you lose.
I'm not going to get into this discussion, but the right to bear arms wasn't in the original constitution. It was added in the third (I think) amendment. The poster was talking about the original constitution. So it's the pro-gun people who should complain, not that anti-gun people. :-)
It's not a violation, as long as you provide the source. The GPL isn't very concerned with how the binaries look, just that you make sure the recipient can get the source under the GPL. How the executable is stored is up to you.
3DNow is floating point. It is, however, hampered in part by the FPU architecture, because it uses the FPU stack for it's registers, IIRC. That means that as soon as you need to do something that 3DNow doesn't do, things get messy. Or so I believe, I haven't looked closely enough at it to be certain of this.
3DNow also only supports single precision. I don't know what "guaranteed accuracy" means here. I seem to recall that the iterative square root and reciprocal algorithms can give you 23 bits of precision, though.
This is all based on reading the 3DNow spec for the K6-2 a long time ago, so it might be wrong or it might not apply to the Athlon.
There is no "one true bottleneck" that limits computer speed. Some apps are limited by disk I/O. Some apps are limited by memory bus speed. Some are limited by network speed. Some are limited by level 2 cache speed. Others are limited by CPU speed. It all depends on the app. Very few games are limited by disk I/O. Very few static page web servers are limited by CPU speed (or so I would hope...). And so on.
Debian does that already. It's called UAE. It only emulates an A500, and there are some things that don't work, but hey! It's an Amiga on your PC! (Or Mac, or workstation or whatever)
I suspect most religions see it as worse to worship a false god than no god at all, so if any of those religions is right, but you don't know which one, atheism (or agnosticism) is the safest choice. It's not necessarily the best choice, though (even if you're unsure which god to believe in). See a discussion of Pascal's Wager (which argues that believing in God is the rational thing to do) if you're interested and haven't already.
You can find one at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
You can bring up the menus with F10, but you can't select in them unless the thing you want to do has an accelerator key. That's annoying. Or am I just missing something?
I don't hate IE because it's from MS, I hate it because the interface sucks. Scrolling in IE is absolutely broken. That's a big enough deal to me that I use Opera instead in Windows, even though I dislike MDI interfaces. IEs UI is also ugly, but that I could live with (and there are ways to fix it, I suppose).
And then there is IE on Solaris... Absolutely useless, it's really slow (and that's on a 440MHz Ultra10 with 256 megs of RAM) and really unstable. Netscape is much more usable. That's my experience with it, anyway.
But then, I use Linux almost exclusively, so IE simply isn't an option.
Netscape was charging for commercial users until Microsoft started giving away an IE of comparable quality (I think it was IE4, because IE3 sucked far worse than any Netscape), at which point Navigator became very hard to sell. Navigator sales once represented about 40% of Netscape's revenues, so having to give it away was a major hit to their bottom line.
Ok, so US copyright law differs more from Swedish copyright law than I thought it did. But if I were to do that (in Sweden), I would hold copyright to the derivative work, and that might mean that I would also hold copyright to it in the rest of the countries that have signed and ratified the Berne convention. But I haven't actually read the Berne convention, so I'm not sure about that.
Actually, there probably isn't much difference. I would only hold copyright to the work in the modified form. If you were to extract the original, I doubt my copyright would still apply.
But that doesn't prevent me from distributing under the GPL, AFAICT, it just means that the GPL wouldn't be completely enforceable. You would have to use the GPL if you wanted to include any of the stuff I modified (like the license notices), but you could extract the original work and it would still be public domain. Whether that invalidates the whole license or not I don't know.