XEmacs had that for years. W3 was the first browser to support CSS (or so they claim). It doesn't do Java or JavaScript, but those are pretty useless anyway. The big problem is that w3 is really slow. Netscape is a speed demon in comparison.
RMS isn't a god, but Linus is. He said so himself, so it must be true.
Our Linus, who art in Transmeta, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in Redmond as it is in Transmeta. Give us this day our daily patch, and forgive us our bugs, as we forgive those who make bugs for us. And lead us not into Windows, but deliver us from Microsoft. Amen.
There is nothing about interfaces that require objects. You need user-definable types, but there are very few typeless languages, so that's not a problem. As long as you have types, you can specify the signatures of every public function, which is what is needed. So there wouldn't need to be anything OO about it. Actually, you don't really need user-definable types, either, but they make it a lot easier.
You can't slap a copyright on a public domain work as is, but as soon as you modify it somehow, you have copyright to the modified work, and then you can GPL it. You can, e.g., simply add a GPL copyright notice in every file, and then license the work under the GPL. So it is certainly possible to take public domain source and put it under the GPL without even changing the actual code. Many people would, of course, find this to be offensive, but that doesn't mean you can't do it.
Why would it matter to a consulting firm if they have to release their code to the client under the GPL? They're not making money from selling code licenses, they're making money by providing services to the customer. Of course, they might also build up an internal repository of components, but if they can get a vast number of components for free, they might consider it worth giving up the advantage they get from having proprietary code for that advantage of having all this free code available to them. For consulting firms specialised in niches, this might not work out to their advantage, but for most consulting firms, I would expect it to make sense. Though I don't have any experience with consulting firms and their code libraries, so I might be way off, but I suspect I'm not for most outfits.
The problem with this is that, AFAIK, the algorithm Fraunhofer has patented is by far the best known algorithm. And I see no need to use another, they don't have a patent on it where I live (Sweden, where you can't patent software), so I'll keep using that one.:)
The (or one, at least) mp3 encoding algorithm is patented by Fraunhofer Institut, and they are exercising their patent rights by demanding people to pay them license fees for mp3 encoders. The big difference here is that they've been doing this since before mp3 became popular, AFAIK. Considering this is part of the MPEG standard, it would surprise me if they haven't. Fraunhofer did manage to shut down at least one free mp3 encoding project, 8Hz, despite the fact that there isn't even a patent in the country it was developed in (the Netherlands). In a way they are worse than Unisys, who have permitted people to make free GIF encoders, but at least they didn't wait until it had become popular and then start demanding license fees.
I have never seen an image not be smaller as a PNG than as a GIF, at least not if you try to make the PNG small. In fact, PNGs are often considerably smaller. The only problem is that older browsers don't support PNG, which is of course a problem. But if you want small images, PNG is a lot better than GIF.
The reason people react violently to Unisys is the fact that for the first 8 or so years of the existence of the GIF format, Unisys didn't say anything about having a patent on the algorithm. Only when the format was a strongly entrenched de facto standard did they come out and say "Hey, we have a patent on LZW. Pay up!". This lost them any good will they might have had (not that I know if they had any to begin with). That's why this is happening. Of course, making it seem like they'd go after people with GIFs on their sites and demand $5000 didn't exactly make things better. If they had been vocal about their patent from the beginning, people wouldn't be complaining now. OTOH, we probably wouldn't be using GIF, either. That's my take on the situation, anyway.
Componentisation with ActiveX and COM? So they are the end-all, be-all of component technology, using something else is not an option? We have lots of complete IDEs. RAD tools aren't that common, but IMHO they suck anyway. Xemacs is a great IDE. Then there are KDevelop, Code Crusader, CodeWarrior, GNUpro, xwpe, RHIDE, and probably a lot of other things that I don't recall at the moment. Exactly what is it that Visual Studio has that these are missing, beyond GUI builders? As for configuration, why do we need a registry? A registry is in no way necessary for GUI config tools, so that's not an argument. A more stable XFree86 would be nice, but given that it has crashed 4 times in 5 years for me, it's not that huge an issue. And with a bit of luck, XFree86 4 might be more stable. A decent web browser we definitely need. And I think Mozilla will provide us with one, though it's a while till that's finished.
Individuals can certainly have it both ways. If I stop paying for CDs and movies, the industry wouldn't even notice. Whether I copy the things that they produce illegally or just abstain from them makes absolutely no difference to them, therefore I can both benefit from the big budget stuff and not pay. If everyone did this, it wouldn't work, of course, but I make negligible difference, so I don't need to worry about that. In case someone wants to say "but what if everyone did that": that's irrelevant. Whether I pay for my entertainment or not does not have an effect on whether other people do so. That, plus the fact that my contribution has negligible effect on the industry, makes that argument irrelevant. Personally, I see no problem in copying things without paying the authors. However, if you appreciate what they produce, it is a good idea to give them money for it, so they can continue doing it. Also it is a way of showing your gratitude, though that can be done without paying money. Additionally, if other people see that those artists get money for what they do, they might be willing to try themselves. But that doesn't make it a moral imperative to pay. People may disagree with this, but that doesn't make them right. The fact that copyright infringement is illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, either, just illegal. There is no such thing as absolute morals.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the reason, but in 1948, making a copy of a book was expensive. In order for a publisher to publish his book, he would either had to have footed the bill himself (probably not something he was willing to do) or give them exclusive rights to it, so that they felt they had a reasonable chance of making a profit off of it. So distributing it freely would have, in essence, meant not distributing at all. Back then most people probably never even considered not getting their work published if they wanted people to read it. Today, an author who is not interested in making money off his work can just put it up on a web page, and let people read it for free. Of course, this make it inaccessible to those who don't use the net, and it is also harder to get people to notice it. The average bookstore probably has only a few thousand titles, often organised in sections, whereas there are hundreds of millions of web pages, and they're almost completely unorganised.
Syntax is superficial. The semantics of a language is the important thing. Of course syntax can be inconvenient or downright evil, but it usually isn't very important. Learning the syntax of a language is a relatively easy thing, the semantics are much harder. Generally, that is, there are always exceptions. Of course syntax can always get in the way, but if it was flexible syntax that decided, everyone would be using Lisp instead of C-like languages. I switch between C-like, Lisp-like and Smalltalk-like languages all the time, I don't have a problem with the syntactic differences.
The QPL does not require that apps linked to it use the GPL. In fact, it doesn't even mention the GPL. It does have some requirements on the licensing for the app, but there are licenses other than the GPL that fulfill those requirements, like BSD, Artistic, MIT, etc.
Lisp machines did not run on "functional processors" (if you mean the same functional as in "functional programming"), they ran on processors optimised for lisp programs. They actually used lisp to write all of the OS, even the low level stuff. And let's not forget that the lispms weren't really meant for functional programming as much as for symbolic computing (which is what lisp really excels at). Lisp isn't really that functional a language, it supports both functional and imperative programming, though functional is often more natural. I could rave about all the cool stuff it offers, but I won't. I'll just say this: Lisp rocks.:) As for lisp machines, they were really cool. Type checking was performed in hardware, the later models had (for the time) kick-ass graphics (1280x1024 pixels, 24 bit color, genlocks, and whatnot), they came with 16-bit audio. And all this in 1984 (or maybe 1985). Lisp machines are still considered by many to be the best software development environment ever. They are really cool, even if the hardware is very dated. I only wish I could get my hands on one.
Most of the people who rant and rave about how everything has to be "open source" here on/. are just trolls. But there is also a big difference between games, apps, libraries and OS when it comes to how much you gain from making them free. If a game doesn't work right, and there is no source, you're out $50 or so. That's a bad thing, but not a disaster. If an app that you have been using suddenly stops working, and there is no source, someone is going to have to reverse engineer the app if you are to be able to use the documents you had produced. Or it might be an app that you depend on in your daily work (maybe something like Notes). This is much worse. If a library breaks, and there is no source, you're really screwed, because now all your programs that depend on that library will be broken, too. If your OS breaks, now all your programs will be non-functional. That's really bad. All of these assume the vendor won't fix the bug, of course, which can happen, and does. I think this is one (simplified) explanation of the reason most people (not counting the trolls) who care about "open source" care less about games being "open source" than about other things.
MacOS is a lot easier to install than Linux, but easier to use? Not to me. Not the way you get it from Apple anyway. There is no shell. I need a shell. A shell lets me do things that are non-trivial in any GUI I've run into. I want my X server, so I can run graphical stuff remotely. And of course, I need my wmaker dockapps.;) And I don't find Mac apps that much easier to use than what I use in Linux. The consistency doesn't give me that much, as far as I can tell. This won't be true for everyone, but it is for me.
It is quite simple to keep people from cheating. Well, to a limited degree, anyway. Do it the MUD way - all processing is done on the server, the client only sends commands and displays the information it receives. It would be quite easy to see to it that this is mostly free from possibilities for abuse. This puts quite a heavy strain on the server, though, especially if you want to use 3D graphics (the server must do much of the calculations needed to determine who can see what, for instance, or seeing through walls becomes easy), and it might also increase latency.
I don't understand why people think the Opera MDI interface is so good. I have a window manager to manage windows, I don't need the app to do that for me. Seems like reinventing the wheel to me...
If it wasn't for Y2k, COBOL programmers would be maintaining the zillions of lines of COBOL code that are in use by companies not willing to invest the time, money and risk of replacing their COBOL systems with something written in a more popular (and possibly better) language. Not to detract from your point, which I agree with otherwise.
If there is a query that can crash the DBMS and/or the OS, then the DBMS and/or OS is broken. Of course, a sysadmin or db programmer who knows about this and doesn't do anything to prevent the query being sent (assuming anything can be done) is an idiot and should be replaced.
Have you tried DDD? I don't know how well it does Java, but I like it for C and C++, which is what I've used it for so far, and it does have support for jdb.
Is there even such a thing as shrink-wrapped software for FreeBSD? Packaging "freeware" is fairly meaningless, because so much is included already in the ports collection, and as for commercial proprietary softwre, even for Linux (a far larger market) there is only StarOffice, Applix and some ports of games (Loki's games, Q2), AFAIK, so there probably isn't much for FreeBSD. But I would have thought if you sell Linux distributions, you would sell Loki's games, as well, and I think you can run those on FreeBSD, but don't quote me on that.
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XEmacs had that for years. W3 was the first browser to support CSS (or so they claim). It doesn't do Java or JavaScript, but those are pretty useless anyway. The big problem is that w3 is really slow. Netscape is a speed demon in comparison.
RMS isn't a god, but Linus is. He said so himself, so it must be true.
Our Linus, who art in Transmeta, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in Redmond as it is in Transmeta.
Give us this day our daily patch, and forgive us our bugs, as we forgive those who make bugs for us.
And lead us not into Windows, but deliver us from Microsoft.
Amen.
It needs something to read the OS off the disk. Think BIOS in a PC, only you can cut down on the functionality even more. That doesn't count as an OS.
There is nothing about interfaces that require objects. You need user-definable types, but there are very few typeless languages, so that's not a problem. As long as you have types, you can specify the signatures of every public function, which is what is needed. So there wouldn't need to be anything OO about it.
Actually, you don't really need user-definable types, either, but they make it a lot easier.
You can't slap a copyright on a public domain work as is, but as soon as you modify it somehow, you have copyright to the modified work, and then you can GPL it. You can, e.g., simply add a GPL copyright notice in every file, and then license the work under the GPL. So it is certainly possible to take public domain source and put it under the GPL without even changing the actual code.
Many people would, of course, find this to be offensive, but that doesn't mean you can't do it.
Why would it matter to a consulting firm if they have to release their code to the client under the GPL? They're not making money from selling code licenses, they're making money by providing services to the customer. Of course, they might also build up an internal repository of components, but if they can get a vast number of components for free, they might consider it worth giving up the advantage they get from having proprietary code for that advantage of having all this free code available to them.
For consulting firms specialised in niches, this might not work out to their advantage, but for most consulting firms, I would expect it to make sense. Though I don't have any experience with consulting firms and their code libraries, so I might be way off, but I suspect I'm not for most outfits.
The problem with this is that, AFAIK, the algorithm Fraunhofer has patented is by far the best known algorithm. And I see no need to use another, they don't have a patent on it where I live (Sweden, where you can't patent software), so I'll keep using that one. :)
The (or one, at least) mp3 encoding algorithm is patented by Fraunhofer Institut, and they are exercising their patent rights by demanding people to pay them license fees for mp3 encoders. The big difference here is that they've been doing this since before mp3 became popular, AFAIK. Considering this is part of the MPEG standard, it would surprise me if they haven't.
Fraunhofer did manage to shut down at least one free mp3 encoding project, 8Hz, despite the fact that there isn't even a patent in the country it was developed in (the Netherlands).
In a way they are worse than Unisys, who have permitted people to make free GIF encoders, but at least they didn't wait until it had become popular and then start demanding license fees.
I have never seen an image not be smaller as a PNG than as a GIF, at least not if you try to make the PNG small. In fact, PNGs are often considerably smaller. The only problem is that older browsers don't support PNG, which is of course a problem. But if you want small images, PNG is a lot better than GIF.
The reason people react violently to Unisys is the fact that for the first 8 or so years of the existence of the GIF format, Unisys didn't say anything about having a patent on the algorithm. Only when the format was a strongly entrenched de facto standard did they come out and say "Hey, we have a patent on LZW. Pay up!". This lost them any good will they might have had (not that I know if they had any to begin with). That's why this is happening. Of course, making it seem like they'd go after people with GIFs on their sites and demand $5000 didn't exactly make things better. If they had been vocal about their patent from the beginning, people wouldn't be complaining now. OTOH, we probably wouldn't be using GIF, either.
That's my take on the situation, anyway.
The big problems with Netscape 4.7 are instability in the Javascript and Java support, and the fact that it leaks memory like there is no tomorrow.
Componentisation with ActiveX and COM? So they are the end-all, be-all of component technology, using something else is not an option?
We have lots of complete IDEs. RAD tools aren't that common, but IMHO they suck anyway. Xemacs is a great IDE. Then there are KDevelop, Code Crusader, CodeWarrior, GNUpro, xwpe, RHIDE, and probably a lot of other things that I don't recall at the moment. Exactly what is it that Visual Studio has that these are missing, beyond GUI builders?
As for configuration, why do we need a registry? A registry is in no way necessary for GUI config tools, so that's not an argument.
A more stable XFree86 would be nice, but given that it has crashed 4 times in 5 years for me, it's not that huge an issue. And with a bit of luck, XFree86 4 might be more stable.
A decent web browser we definitely need. And I think Mozilla will provide us with one, though it's a while till that's finished.
Individuals can certainly have it both ways. If I stop paying for CDs and movies, the industry wouldn't even notice. Whether I copy the things that they produce illegally or just abstain from them makes absolutely no difference to them, therefore I can both benefit from the big budget stuff and not pay. If everyone did this, it wouldn't work, of course, but I make negligible difference, so I don't need to worry about that.
In case someone wants to say "but what if everyone did that": that's irrelevant. Whether I pay for my entertainment or not does not have an effect on whether other people do so. That, plus the fact that my contribution has negligible effect on the industry, makes that argument irrelevant.
Personally, I see no problem in copying things without paying the authors. However, if you appreciate what they produce, it is a good idea to give them money for it, so they can continue doing it. Also it is a way of showing your gratitude, though that can be done without paying money. Additionally, if other people see that those artists get money for what they do, they might be willing to try themselves. But that doesn't make it a moral imperative to pay. People may disagree with this, but that doesn't make them right. The fact that copyright infringement is illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, either, just illegal. There is no such thing as absolute morals.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the reason, but in 1948, making a copy of a book was expensive. In order for a publisher to publish his book, he would either had to have footed the bill himself (probably not something he was willing to do) or give them exclusive rights to it, so that they felt they had a reasonable chance of making a profit off of it. So distributing it freely would have, in essence, meant not distributing at all. Back then most people probably never even considered not getting their work published if they wanted people to read it.
Today, an author who is not interested in making money off his work can just put it up on a web page, and let people read it for free. Of course, this make it inaccessible to those who don't use the net, and it is also harder to get people to notice it. The average bookstore probably has only a few thousand titles, often organised in sections, whereas there are hundreds of millions of web pages, and they're almost completely unorganised.
Syntax is superficial. The semantics of a language is the important thing. Of course syntax can be inconvenient or downright evil, but it usually isn't very important. Learning the syntax of a language is a relatively easy thing, the semantics are much harder. Generally, that is, there are always exceptions.
Of course syntax can always get in the way, but if it was flexible syntax that decided, everyone would be using Lisp instead of C-like languages.
I switch between C-like, Lisp-like and Smalltalk-like languages all the time, I don't have a problem with the syntactic differences.
The QPL does not require that apps linked to it use the GPL. In fact, it doesn't even mention the GPL. It does have some requirements on the licensing for the app, but there are licenses other than the GPL that fulfill those requirements, like BSD, Artistic, MIT, etc.
Lisp machines did not run on "functional processors" (if you mean the same functional as in "functional programming"), they ran on processors optimised for lisp programs. They actually used lisp to write all of the OS, even the low level stuff. And let's not forget that the lispms weren't really meant for functional programming as much as for symbolic computing (which is what lisp really excels at). Lisp isn't really that functional a language, it supports both functional and imperative programming, though functional is often more natural. I could rave about all the cool stuff it offers, but I won't. I'll just say this: Lisp rocks. :)
As for lisp machines, they were really cool. Type checking was performed in hardware, the later models had (for the time) kick-ass graphics (1280x1024 pixels, 24 bit color, genlocks, and whatnot), they came with 16-bit audio. And all this in 1984 (or maybe 1985). Lisp machines are still considered by many to be the best software development environment ever. They are really cool, even if the hardware is very dated.
I only wish I could get my hands on one.
Most of the people who rant and rave about how everything has to be "open source" here on /. are just trolls. But there is also a big difference between games, apps, libraries and OS when it comes to how much you gain from making them free.
If a game doesn't work right, and there is no source, you're out $50 or so. That's a bad thing, but not a disaster.
If an app that you have been using suddenly stops working, and there is no source, someone is going to have to reverse engineer the app if you are to be able to use the documents you had produced. Or it might be an app that you depend on in your daily work (maybe something like Notes). This is much worse.
If a library breaks, and there is no source, you're really screwed, because now all your programs that depend on that library will be broken, too.
If your OS breaks, now all your programs will be non-functional. That's really bad.
All of these assume the vendor won't fix the bug, of course, which can happen, and does.
I think this is one (simplified) explanation of the reason most people (not counting the trolls) who care about "open source" care less about games being "open source" than about other things.
MacOS is a lot easier to install than Linux, but easier to use? Not to me. Not the way you get it from Apple anyway. There is no shell. I need a shell. A shell lets me do things that are non-trivial in any GUI I've run into. I want my X server, so I can run graphical stuff remotely. And of course, I need my wmaker dockapps. ;)
And I don't find Mac apps that much easier to use than what I use in Linux. The consistency doesn't give me that much, as far as I can tell. This won't be true for everyone, but it is for me.
It is quite simple to keep people from cheating. Well, to a limited degree, anyway. Do it the MUD way - all processing is done on the server, the client only sends commands and displays the information it receives. It would be quite easy to see to it that this is mostly free from possibilities for abuse. This puts quite a heavy strain on the server, though, especially if you want to use 3D graphics (the server must do much of the calculations needed to determine who can see what, for instance, or seeing through walls becomes easy), and it might also increase latency.
I don't understand why people think the Opera MDI interface is so good. I have a window manager to manage windows, I don't need the app to do that for me. Seems like reinventing the wheel to me...
If it wasn't for Y2k, COBOL programmers would be maintaining the zillions of lines of COBOL code that are in use by companies not willing to invest the time, money and risk of replacing their COBOL systems with something written in a more popular (and possibly better) language.
Not to detract from your point, which I agree with otherwise.
If there is a query that can crash the DBMS and/or the OS, then the DBMS and/or OS is broken. Of course, a sysadmin or db programmer who knows about this and doesn't do anything to prevent the query being sent (assuming anything can be done) is an idiot and should be replaced.
Have you tried DDD? I don't know how well it does Java, but I like it for C and C++, which is what I've used it for so far, and it does have support for jdb.
Is there even such a thing as shrink-wrapped software for FreeBSD? Packaging "freeware" is fairly meaningless, because so much is included already in the ports collection, and as for commercial proprietary softwre, even for Linux (a far larger market) there is only StarOffice, Applix and some ports of games (Loki's games, Q2), AFAIK, so there probably isn't much for FreeBSD.
But I would have thought if you sell Linux distributions, you would sell Loki's games, as well, and I think you can run those on FreeBSD, but don't quote me on that.