Why is the open source community incapable of outdoing commercial de-facto standard apps with poor UIs?
Perhaps it's that with an application this large you really need designers that have a consistent vision for what it needs to be like and every new feature that is introduced that requires a GUI element needs to go through a design process. If you switch designers you're likely to end up with inconsistent design throughout the application. People have their own opinions about how things should be done, if you lose a developer and he/she is replaced then whether he/she refactors the area of code they are responsible for has no visible impact on the user, but if a designer does that then the effect is immediate inconsistency.
Also maybe UI designers are less inclined to work for free? So you end up with UIs designed by programmers instead, they work the way a programmer thinks they should work which is rarely how an end user thinks they should work. A similar situation occurs with documentation.
The exception to this is probably Blender, the more recent UI improvements and high quality of documentation show the high level of community (by that I include production studios and independent hobbyists and professionals) interest, support and use of the product not to mention the contributions made to it. In professional circles photographers don't use GIMP, they use Photoshop just as most use MS Office over Libre/Open Office. Blender has some real, genuine advantages over its proprietary competitors, it isn't just a me-too, fast-follower product that copies a proprietary one and that is why it is successful.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow .
--- Linux Torvalds
Actually that was Eric Raymond, and it is evident that in fact there never are enough eyeballs (at least ones that can comprehend what they are looking at). The theory is sound but in practice it is not.
My point is that nothing about this situation is any kind of failing of open source software if you had realistic expectations to begin with. There was a really bad bug that was introduced into a widely distributed piece of open source software and after a few years, some people found it and it's now getting fixed.
Of course, but it's those people that perpetuate the unrealistic expectations that have been put in their place. The fact that such people spread that nonsense is entirely the reason you have people now saying "a bug in widely used open source software?! how could that happen?!"
Because it is in an area with such a vocal group of people spouting "Impenetrable" for decades, it all of the sudden becomes quite newsworthy in a way that "yet-another-remote-code-execution-with-privilege-escalation-in-Acrobat-Reader" vulnerability doesn't.
Or maybe because - unlike OpenSSL - nobody is running products like acrobat reader on their server which contains millions of usernames, passwords and the encryption keys that go with them that is vulnerable to this bug.
It is also common to assume that when someone says "Anyone can verify open source software to be secure and non-malicious", they are saying "No one is prevented from verifying open source software", rather than "Anyone (regardless of their software engineering ability) will find every single bug in a piece of open source software."
It isn't a matter of "every single bug in a piece of open source software", this is a hugely deployed piece of open source security software and you would expect that if the "many eyes" thing were indeed true then this is exactly the place it would be demonstrated yet what we have here is one of the most widely deployed critical security bugs ever. This isn't a condemnation of open source in any way, just of the misguided vocal advocates that pad their arguments with falsehoods rather than focussing on the real advantages of open source (like the speed at which bugs like this can be patched).
If you thought that it was claimed that every piece of open source software was bug free (contingent upon being "verified" as such), I'm sorry to tell you that you were misinformed.
I know such claims have always been false and this is just more proof of it at the most prominent and non-theoretical level so I'm not quite sure what your point is. This alone didn't disprove the claim, it just added more proof (and at an extremely high visiblity) that the claim is false.
FOSS is nowhere in the conversation, btw...this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this was Open Source project.
Well it does show that the often-used argument that open source is better because "I can review the code to make sure it is secure and not malicious" is false, not even the biggest vendors did that before using this code.
It doesn't, I'm wondering whether the boycott was due to to Eich or the behavior of the employees who had him ousted. Like for example OKCupid's boycott was just silliness as it was directed at Eich but obviously affected both him (the prop 8 proponent) and the employees who were prop 8 opponents.
Then prove it. To show that something is obvious at the time the video was made, having admitted that the video doesn't show continuous movement, all you need is another reference from the same era that does.
There's plenty, like this one which clearly shows continuous movement dragging a UI element. (see ~5 minute mark)
Now, all along, I've been saying one thing: this is new in view of the video
If you take the video in isolation, yes. But who the hell is doing that? Nobody is arguing that this video alone - irrespective of anything else - is sufficient to disprove Apple's claim. Why would you even point out non-continuous movement?
"you're saying this is revolutionary and Steve Jobs should get the Nobel prize and be made Emperor of all tech and that's crazy and the patent system is broken and you're stupid and I like turtles!"
Meanwhile you've been saying "Apple's claim and this video aren't identical, i see 3 frames and can't see any correlation between that and animation of continuous movement", well no shit, nobody ever said they were and nobody is attempting to take this video in isolation to prove or disprove anything. Non-continous movement when dragging a UI element is a side-effect of the technology available at the time the video was made, it is obvious so it is irrelevant.
But here, I was assuming you would say "no, it is obvious". That's the no.
We have a Boolean AND. One input is yes. The other input is no. What's the output?
Why are you making the assumption that the other input is no? I would think the addition of "unlock" on a slider control is pretty obvious, in fact given that almost every real-world representation of such a control does exactly that it is extremely obvious.
But the thing you have continually ignored is that even if you prove it to be novel and non-obvious it is still just an idea and you cannot patent an idea, you can only patent the implementation of an idea. That's the whole point of a patent, to protect a particular implementation, arguing over whether an idea is novel and non-obvious is pointless because it's just an idea.
I and 5 others deleted Mozilla and moved to Chrome. It felt weird after all these years to not have Firefox but we voted with our feet. It's not even a gay thing, it's a "we are sick of bullies and hypocrites" thing.
But what about the LGBT employees there? The CEO was just one of the employees (and now he's gone) so the only people you're hurting are the other Mozilla employees, why are you so against them?
That's why I prefer the BSD license, it is about altruism and collaborating with people who may have different ideologies. They may contribute their code back, they may not or they may only contribute some code back and that is their choice rather than the "if you're not going to play by my rules then i'm not going to play with you at all" of the GPL.
OMG. How many times do I have to repeat this? "New" and "non-obvious" are different and distinct requirements.
Yes sorry that should've been or, not and.
I am not arguing that it is "non-obvious". I'm arguing something very, very, very simple: the patent claims X. The prior art video does not show X.
This is what I'm trying to determine, so you can take existing art, add one thing to it then it's patentable? Doesn't that sound a little silly to you? Like I said from the start I'm not saying you're wrong by the legal definition, I'm saying the patent system is royally screwed up if all you need to do is tack something on the end of something existing and it's a patentable "invention".
But the broader issue is that if that's the case then Apple's claim against Samsung is also invalid, because Samsung's implementation is different, the idea is the same but the implementation is different so how can that infringe?
Whether they're innovative is a separate question, and nothing about that is implied by admitting that, yes, the video shows three frames of movement, while the patent claims "continuous" movement.
For what definition of "continuous"? If you move the slider on the iPhone slowly you can see that it is not continuous, so that's out the window. And simply adding frames is obvious, that's how animation works.
The other element is "unlock", now if you're going to argue that part is new and non-obvious then for the sake of argument let's say that's fine, but in that case Samsung is not infringing because Samsung's implementation of "unlock" is different to Apple's, the idea is unlock - but you cannot patent an idea - and the implementation of unlock is different in Samsung's version than Apple's so they cannot possibly be infringing.
People are abandoning GNU's forced openness and going to licenses that basically let big companies exploit the software any way they want to.
Because it's about altruism and about writing code, not about furthering your ideological agenda.
If you want to be an activist in the software world and tie your ideology to your code then you already have the tools to do so, but you do have to make better software than everybody else and make software that regular people actually want to use.
There are some exceptional examples of great Free Software that further the GNU ideology but these are almost exclusively developer/admin tools, not products that end users have anything to do with. Free Software is great for developers to work together but it has never really succeeded in winning over end users. There's no reason the first real captivating smartphone or tablet or smartwatch couldn't have been produced by the Open Source and Free Software community but the barrier is that it is a developer-centric innovator while being a user-centric fast-follower. Great innovation for developer tools but a me-too for end user products.
And that's why i believe the BSD licenses are the most open of all open-source licenses.
Of course it is, GPL is all about freedom for the user over freedom for the developer, about being restrictive so that the source code is re-distributed which is its fundamental flaw: users don't care about source code, that's what developers care about! BSD is about giving freedom to developers who have the option about how much freedom to extend to the user and that user has the choice of whether to accept that developer's product or to choose something else.
Which matters - let me know how trying to run Apple on non-apple hardware without paying for a license goes, in comparison to a GPL'd OS.
FFS when are you idiots going to get it?! Free Software is about Freedom, it's not about it being gratis! Whether or not you pay for something is irrelevant in terms of Free Software.
IOW the GPL is the superior license over the BSD type licenses.
No, there is no requirement in the GPL that would force Apple to pay for it if they used it. You seem to be confused about what the requirements of the GPL license are, it is about code contribution, not about monetary contribution.
What I meant was that MS didn't do it for the same reason a Google does it.
Yeah because you really know exactly why these companies do it. Microsoft has been donating to the Apache foundation for over 1/2 a decade now and still continue to do it and that hasn't affected the foundation's direction in any profound way. So while I'm sure the MS conspiracy theorists love to postulate about how MS will try to control ASF, in over 5 years there is still nothing that gives any basis to whatever it is you are claiming. I doubt lack of proof would stop you spreading your FUD though.
Well, you admit that this - "the only difference is that they specified the post operation action" - is not in the prior art video.
That's not innovative! That is clearly obvious! Having an onscreen toggle do something is not innovative, what would even be the point of having such a thing if it didn't do anything?! And using that toggle to "unlock a phone" is an idea, not an implementation of an idea and you cannot patent an idea. The patent system is designed to share ideas while protecting innovative individual implementations of that idea.
There's also the feature about continuous movement of an image corresponding to a finger position. That's not in the video.
There's clearly 3 frames of movement there that follow the touch, whether that is the refresh rate of the screen or just how many animation frames they have doesn't really matter, sure the iPhone has a higher refresh rate and more frames but that doesn't make it different.
No, you are confused. Apple got a patent on this and the only difference is that they specified the post operation action and do it "on a handheld device".
So what exactly is screwed up there, and who is calling that "innovation"?
The USPTO is calling it innovation, this exact thing has already been implemented as per the video with the difference that it is "on a handheld device".
Try it this way: what part of this is not covered in prior art and is thus innovative?
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Why is the open source community incapable of outdoing commercial de-facto standard apps with poor UIs?
Perhaps it's that with an application this large you really need designers that have a consistent vision for what it needs to be like and every new feature that is introduced that requires a GUI element needs to go through a design process. If you switch designers you're likely to end up with inconsistent design throughout the application. People have their own opinions about how things should be done, if you lose a developer and he/she is replaced then whether he/she refactors the area of code they are responsible for has no visible impact on the user, but if a designer does that then the effect is immediate inconsistency.
Also maybe UI designers are less inclined to work for free? So you end up with UIs designed by programmers instead, they work the way a programmer thinks they should work which is rarely how an end user thinks they should work. A similar situation occurs with documentation.
The exception to this is probably Blender, the more recent UI improvements and high quality of documentation show the high level of community (by that I include production studios and independent hobbyists and professionals) interest, support and use of the product not to mention the contributions made to it. In professional circles photographers don't use GIMP, they use Photoshop just as most use MS Office over Libre/Open Office. Blender has some real, genuine advantages over its proprietary competitors, it isn't just a me-too, fast-follower product that copies a proprietary one and that is why it is successful.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow . --- Linux Torvalds
Actually that was Eric Raymond, and it is evident that in fact there never are enough eyeballs (at least ones that can comprehend what they are looking at). The theory is sound but in practice it is not.
My point is that nothing about this situation is any kind of failing of open source software if you had realistic expectations to begin with. There was a really bad bug that was introduced into a widely distributed piece of open source software and after a few years, some people found it and it's now getting fixed.
Of course, but it's those people that perpetuate the unrealistic expectations that have been put in their place. The fact that such people spread that nonsense is entirely the reason you have people now saying "a bug in widely used open source software?! how could that happen?!"
Because it is in an area with such a vocal group of people spouting "Impenetrable" for decades, it all of the sudden becomes quite newsworthy in a way that "yet-another-remote-code-execution-with-privilege-escalation-in-Acrobat-Reader" vulnerability doesn't.
Or maybe because - unlike OpenSSL - nobody is running products like acrobat reader on their server which contains millions of usernames, passwords and the encryption keys that go with them that is vulnerable to this bug.
It is also common to assume that when someone says "Anyone can verify open source software to be secure and non-malicious", they are saying "No one is prevented from verifying open source software", rather than "Anyone (regardless of their software engineering ability) will find every single bug in a piece of open source software."
It isn't a matter of "every single bug in a piece of open source software", this is a hugely deployed piece of open source security software and you would expect that if the "many eyes" thing were indeed true then this is exactly the place it would be demonstrated yet what we have here is one of the most widely deployed critical security bugs ever. This isn't a condemnation of open source in any way, just of the misguided vocal advocates that pad their arguments with falsehoods rather than focussing on the real advantages of open source (like the speed at which bugs like this can be patched).
If you thought that it was claimed that every piece of open source software was bug free (contingent upon being "verified" as such), I'm sorry to tell you that you were misinformed.
I know such claims have always been false and this is just more proof of it at the most prominent and non-theoretical level so I'm not quite sure what your point is. This alone didn't disprove the claim, it just added more proof (and at an extremely high visiblity) that the claim is false.
No it has been that open source can be verified to be secure and non-malicious, which is true only in theory, not in practice.
FOSS is nowhere in the conversation, btw...this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this was Open Source project.
Well it does show that the often-used argument that open source is better because "I can review the code to make sure it is secure and not malicious" is false, not even the biggest vendors did that before using this code.
Right, I can't imagine unlocking a phone would be difficult to find.
It doesn't, I'm wondering whether the boycott was due to to Eich or the behavior of the employees who had him ousted. Like for example OKCupid's boycott was just silliness as it was directed at Eich but obviously affected both him (the prop 8 proponent) and the employees who were prop 8 opponents.
Then prove it. To show that something is obvious at the time the video was made, having admitted that the video doesn't show continuous movement, all you need is another reference from the same era that does.
There's plenty, like this one which clearly shows continuous movement dragging a UI element. (see ~5 minute mark)
Now, all along, I've been saying one thing: this is new in view of the video
If you take the video in isolation, yes. But who the hell is doing that? Nobody is arguing that this video alone - irrespective of anything else - is sufficient to disprove Apple's claim. Why would you even point out non-continuous movement?
"you're saying this is revolutionary and Steve Jobs should get the Nobel prize and be made Emperor of all tech and that's crazy and the patent system is broken and you're stupid and I like turtles!"
Meanwhile you've been saying "Apple's claim and this video aren't identical, i see 3 frames and can't see any correlation between that and animation of continuous movement", well no shit, nobody ever said they were and nobody is attempting to take this video in isolation to prove or disprove anything. Non-continous movement when dragging a UI element is a side-effect of the technology available at the time the video was made, it is obvious so it is irrelevant.
But here, I was assuming you would say "no, it is obvious". That's the no.
Yet they got the patent.
We have a Boolean AND. One input is yes. The other input is no. What's the output?
Why are you making the assumption that the other input is no? I would think the addition of "unlock" on a slider control is pretty obvious, in fact given that almost every real-world representation of such a control does exactly that it is extremely obvious.
But the thing you have continually ignored is that even if you prove it to be novel and non-obvious it is still just an idea and you cannot patent an idea, you can only patent the implementation of an idea. That's the whole point of a patent, to protect a particular implementation, arguing over whether an idea is novel and non-obvious is pointless because it's just an idea.
Fair enough.
I and 5 others deleted Mozilla and moved to Chrome. It felt weird after all these years to not have Firefox but we voted with our feet. It's not even a gay thing, it's a "we are sick of bullies and hypocrites" thing.
But what about the LGBT employees there? The CEO was just one of the employees (and now he's gone) so the only people you're hurting are the other Mozilla employees, why are you so against them?
That's why I prefer the BSD license, it is about altruism and collaborating with people who may have different ideologies. They may contribute their code back, they may not or they may only contribute some code back and that is their choice rather than the "if you're not going to play by my rules then i'm not going to play with you at all" of the GPL.
OMG. How many times do I have to repeat this? "New" and "non-obvious" are different and distinct requirements.
Yes sorry that should've been or, not and.
I am not arguing that it is "non-obvious". I'm arguing something very, very, very simple: the patent claims X. The prior art video does not show X.
This is what I'm trying to determine, so you can take existing art, add one thing to it then it's patentable? Doesn't that sound a little silly to you? Like I said from the start I'm not saying you're wrong by the legal definition, I'm saying the patent system is royally screwed up if all you need to do is tack something on the end of something existing and it's a patentable "invention".
But the broader issue is that if that's the case then Apple's claim against Samsung is also invalid, because Samsung's implementation is different, the idea is the same but the implementation is different so how can that infringe?
Whether they're innovative is a separate question, and nothing about that is implied by admitting that, yes, the video shows three frames of movement, while the patent claims "continuous" movement.
For what definition of "continuous"? If you move the slider on the iPhone slowly you can see that it is not continuous, so that's out the window. And simply adding frames is obvious, that's how animation works.
The other element is "unlock", now if you're going to argue that part is new and non-obvious then for the sake of argument let's say that's fine, but in that case Samsung is not infringing because Samsung's implementation of "unlock" is different to Apple's, the idea is unlock - but you cannot patent an idea - and the implementation of unlock is different in Samsung's version than Apple's so they cannot possibly be infringing.
Maybe the fat cat just has a glandular problem?
People are abandoning GNU's forced openness and going to licenses that basically let big companies exploit the software any way they want to.
Because it's about altruism and about writing code, not about furthering your ideological agenda.
If you want to be an activist in the software world and tie your ideology to your code then you already have the tools to do so, but you do have to make better software than everybody else and make software that regular people actually want to use.
There are some exceptional examples of great Free Software that further the GNU ideology but these are almost exclusively developer/admin tools, not products that end users have anything to do with. Free Software is great for developers to work together but it has never really succeeded in winning over end users. There's no reason the first real captivating smartphone or tablet or smartwatch couldn't have been produced by the Open Source and Free Software community but the barrier is that it is a developer-centric innovator while being a user-centric fast-follower. Great innovation for developer tools but a me-too for end user products.
And that's why i believe the BSD licenses are the most open of all open-source licenses.
Of course it is, GPL is all about freedom for the user over freedom for the developer, about being restrictive so that the source code is re-distributed which is its fundamental flaw: users don't care about source code, that's what developers care about! BSD is about giving freedom to developers who have the option about how much freedom to extend to the user and that user has the choice of whether to accept that developer's product or to choose something else.
Which matters - let me know how trying to run Apple on non-apple hardware without paying for a license goes, in comparison to a GPL'd OS.
FFS when are you idiots going to get it?! Free Software is about Freedom, it's not about it being gratis! Whether or not you pay for something is irrelevant in terms of Free Software.
IOW the GPL is the superior license over the BSD type licenses.
No, there is no requirement in the GPL that would force Apple to pay for it if they used it. You seem to be confused about what the requirements of the GPL license are, it is about code contribution, not about monetary contribution.
What I meant was that MS didn't do it for the same reason a Google does it.
Yeah because you really know exactly why these companies do it. Microsoft has been donating to the Apache foundation for over 1/2 a decade now and still continue to do it and that hasn't affected the foundation's direction in any profound way. So while I'm sure the MS conspiracy theorists love to postulate about how MS will try to control ASF, in over 5 years there is still nothing that gives any basis to whatever it is you are claiming. I doubt lack of proof would stop you spreading your FUD though.
Well, you admit that this - "the only difference is that they specified the post operation action" - is not in the prior art video.
That's not innovative! That is clearly obvious! Having an onscreen toggle do something is not innovative, what would even be the point of having such a thing if it didn't do anything?! And using that toggle to "unlock a phone" is an idea, not an implementation of an idea and you cannot patent an idea. The patent system is designed to share ideas while protecting innovative individual implementations of that idea.
There's also the feature about continuous movement of an image corresponding to a finger position. That's not in the video.
There's clearly 3 frames of movement there that follow the touch, whether that is the refresh rate of the screen or just how many animation frames they have doesn't really matter, sure the iPhone has a higher refresh rate and more frames but that doesn't make it different.
Uh... I think you may be confused.
No, you are confused. Apple got a patent on this and the only difference is that they specified the post operation action and do it "on a handheld device".
So what exactly is screwed up there, and who is calling that "innovation"?
The USPTO is calling it innovation, this exact thing has already been implemented as per the video with the difference that it is "on a handheld device".
Try it this way: what part of this is not covered in prior art and is thus innovative?