I mean, I know it's not US carriers yet. But when (if) it is, he's essentially just saying "Ubuntu puts the control back into the hands of Verizon Wireless, at&t, T-Mobile and Sprint."
How exactly are you inferring that? He isn't saying that at all, it clearly says: Canonical has partnered with BQ in Europe and Meizu in China and neither of these partners is a carrier, they are device manufacturers.
People generally need a reason to switch platforms. So far almost everything from open source that hasn't been on the server side has been about how the product is "just as good" as the closed source equivalent. Do the open source advocates really think I'm going to switch platforms over something that is "just as good" with no clear advantages?
What they think is that "software freedom" is the advantage, that people should be willing to give up convenience for freedom, for example running their own "cloud" services so they do their computing on their computer rather than using somebody elses.
Many of them still don't understand one simple thing that everybody else knows - and it's pretty obvious - which is that you cannot disrupt a market with a me-too product. You need either a disruptive product to change an existing market or a new and innovative product to create a new market. The FOSS world was still fumbling in the desktop market and vendors like RIM and then Apple innovated in the smartphone market, there's no reason that innovation could not have come from the FOSS community but they are now - years later - still trying to play catch up. The same thing happened in the tablet market and I don't see it being successful because it just isn't disruptive or innovative, it's just a free copy and often it is less convenient and/or less user friendly. FOSS solutions - I'm talking user-facing, not all the brilliant backend stuff - need to innovate to get over the stigma of them just being also-ran knock-offs.
Windows Phone is not a viable alternative, it's a complete joke
I didn't find anything objectively wrong with it. I've tried it and quite liked it but at the time (WP7) it lacked a few features I needed but performance was excellent, with Android it was flexible but the performance was awful - though I've seen this has improved in the last 2 years or so - and ultimately I settled on iOS as it had the features and performance while being limited in terms of hardware choice. I found all 3 platforms are very good so I can't understand how supposedly objective people can have such strong opinions for/against any of them outside of some ideological opinion or specific personal needs without actually basing it on factual details.
No, what sucks is that there's no search bar where I can type "Printers" or "ODBC" and there pops up the appropriate Control Panel or Administrator functions.
Sure there is, Windows Key + S. A search bar slides out and you can type "Printers" and you'll get the control panel Devices & Printers pane as one of the results, same as hitting the Windows Key and start typing in Windows 7.
For some reason, there's a concerted campaign happening to try to convince people that Google has locked up Android. It's an odd thing to pretend, and I'm wondering what their motive is?
No it is that people are realising that 'Open Source' and 'Free Software' are not the same thing. If Google wants to put a proprietary layer atop Android that's fine, Android itself is still 'Open Source' even if you have proprietary applications requiring proprietary APIs running on it. In addition the development process is closed, you don't see the development branch for the next version even though it is being actively worked on unless you are part of the OHA, which isn't necessarily a problem but it's another element that differs from traditional 'Open Source' models. It is people being pedantic but also pointing out that things aren't as open as you might think they are, previously everything was open, now some old open things have been replaced with closed ones and some new things are closed...Does this matter to you? maybe. Does this matter to most people? Probably not. Will this impact companies looking to leverage the existing Android user base? Probably.
Google hasn't locked up Android, they have only locked up the stock applications and the new application services platform. Which is really out of necessity since they need a revenue stream from somewhere and by keeping it open it is easy for anybody to cut off that revenue stream or redirect it.
But is it any worse than the iron grip apple has on IOS?
Yes, because while Apple holds a dictatorship over iOS that does mean that you don't end up with a bunch of incompatible versions. Your "Android apps" won't run on Amazon's Android or Aliyun's Android if they require proprietary (or even open but unimplemented) APIs only present in Google's Android and vice versa.
How exactly does this preclude interoperability? Even in cases like office suites where you have proprietary products that aren't forks of a free programs (MS Office and iWork), a SaaS model in Google Docs and free options like Libre and Open Office there are people interoperating. In some cases you can end up with formatting problems but this is an extreme case where the products in question aren't even derived from the same code base at all yet allow for interoperability.
And even if the proprietary version was an incompatible fork why would people to move to a system that didn't allow them to interoperate if interoperability was important?
I think that was pretty much the argument against companies forking Android, if you want application compatibility then for the most part you are going to have to reverse-engineer and re-implement your own version of the entire GMS, the proprietary closed-source layer of applications and services that sits on top of AOSP.
A lot of the Android ones are too - not so much on iOS though, maybe they get rejected - and have you ever tried searching "fart" on the Android app store? It's fucking pages and pages and pages long, rubbish like that certainly pads it out. Not saying Windows doesn't have the same issue, maybe it does, but saying "hey it has 1.1 million apps" is a pretty pointless metric.
they denied modified software to be run on their system.
Ah but it is not their system, you bought it, it's your system. Now I understand the case where software is licensed rather than sold but hardware is sold, not licensed and you can do whatever you want with it, but of course if it is restricted by proprietary software - say a bootloader - that is licensed rather than sold then you may have a hard time doing that. Though that does not mean you couldn't replace the ROM containing the bootloader because it is your hardware, but that's probably more trouble than it's worth.
The purpose of GPLv3's section 6 is to compel them to enable and instruct the user on how to install it on the system. The same clause exists in AGPL.
The question remains: Does not owning hardware circumvent the clause?
Yes, because it relates to a "User Product" which a Tivo is but - for example - a cloud-based render farm is not.
Considering that AGPL(v3, the FSF version) is based on GPLv3 and features the same anti-TiVoization article (nr. 6), please explain why you think it's still subject to TiVoization
I didn't say it was Tivoization I said it is the element of it that you cannot necessarily make use of the code. I can get Tivo's code and theoretically use Tivo's code in compatible system if one existed, but I can't replace the code on the Tivo with my own modified version, just like I could use the code from a cloud-based render farm service but I can't replace the code on that render farm with my own modified version.
why does ownership of the machine matter?
Because if the target platform is custom hardware and you own it you can theoretically run software on it, if the platform is custom hardware and you don't own it then how are you going to run software on it? Can you run software on my computer? No.
Do you think that the license cannot compel the service provider to allow upload of modified software?
I don't see anything in the license that does that.
Continuing development of the original won't be terribly useful when the majority of users have moved on to the new incompatible proprietary version...
Why not? Aren't you developing it because you want to use it?
By continuing development you will have to reinvent the wheel to duplicate any changes in the proprietary version
If the proprietary version didn't exist you would still have to do that work to develop those features anyway.
Plus a proprietary version is likely to have a much bigger marketing budget, and thus the lions share of end users, and with proprietary changes making it ever harder to use the original open version.
Why does it matter whether that version has more users? I don't use a program because of the amount of other people that use it, I use it because it serves my needs.
They still exist, but are often used for student projects and tech demos. Building the game engine and the associated tech demos to show it off is the (relatively) easy part. Creating a decent game with proper art assets, animation, music, voice actors, level design and a good storyline with well-developed characters is the hard part. It requires a lot more effort than collaboratively building application middleware and many studios prefer to use proven commercial engines like UE, iD tech, CryEngine, Source, etc... that are artifacts of actually building a commercial game rather than building just an engine.
I'm not saying these things are essential for all games but often for notable ones and in the case of simple games it is often not worth the effort to learn/use an engine that has so many features you aren't going to need.
The AGPL has the same problem that the GPLv2 has which was solved by the GPLv3, essentially Tivoization in which you can get access to the code but you can't necessarily make use of it and since you don't get the binary distribution or run it yourself you can never verify it anyway or verify that there isn't some other software involved at some point. That is always going to be fighting a losing battle because it is a case where end users want to do their computing on computers that they do not control and which do not belong to them.
Ok but where is this actually happening? People have been raving on about this for decades in the restrictive vs permissive license debate. Restrictive cuts off collaboration with proprietary vendors and permissive relies on proprietary vendors contributing back voluntarily. There's always the anti-permissive doom-and-gloom scenarios but when have they ever actually played out like that? And even if they did you could just fork the permissive codebase to a restrictive one which would cut off the proprietary vendors and just continue on as before without that collaboration.
This attack vector, used by aggressive vendors who want to kill open competition, is what the GPL was intended to prevent.
Which "aggressive vendors" have done this? Even the most locked-down ones like Apple have contributed back and made their sources available, not only to the free software community but even to their direct competitors. Look at Webkit, Darwin, Clang/LLVM, CUPS, OpenSSL, etc...
But even then RMS is opposed to the very existence of LLVM just because it is a project that competes with GCC but does not share his ideology and he does not want to allow collaboration between free software and proprietary software developers which he makes quite clear and that sort of zealotry should be discouraged:
"The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers -- so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us." http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html
BSD code works much the same way, you have more freedom with the initial version but there's nothing to stop future versions offering you no freedom whatsoever.
So just use the original version or fork that original version and continue development. The BSD license does not force you to contribute everything you do back (it is your choice what and how much you contribute back), and really that's the way it should be IMHO, it should be about people collaborating because they see a benefit in doing it, not because they are forced to do it. Permissive licenses allow those who may not share the same ideology in its entirety to collaborate to at least some degree whereas restrictive licenses force their ideology and an exclusion policy like that is not productive.
RMS himself said the reason he does not like LLVM is because "all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us", if you don't accept his ideology in its entirety he won't help you, that is just religious extremism. It allows free and proprietary vendors to work together and RMS is directly opposed to that collaboration.
...also don't resort to argumentum ad absurdum by comparing the freedom to distribute source code to the freedom to torture and murder people, that's just silliness.
It does NOT do the same jobs that Flash did, especially web animation and gaming
In what way? As far as gaming is concerned Stage3D and WebGL are very similar but native is further ahead as you can take advantage of specific platform and hardware features.
What has HTML V5 given us? It has given us a billion proprietary apps to allow the same content that before could have been accessed by any browser with Flash
But that would mean that you couldn't make use of any platform-specific features or hardware optimizations until Adobe added them to Flash, that's a horrible situation to be in. For example Stage3D does not support OpenGLES 3.0 but the iPhone5s does as does particular hardware on Android 4.3+. Not to mention there would be no consistent UI design.
it has given us a "standard" that is being pretty much controlled by Cupertino and Redmond who are pushing for DRM and other nasty shit that won't work on any platform but theirs, and it has given us websites that run like absolute shit on anything but the latest and greatest CPUs
Hang on, on the one hand you're saying it's all a big Cupertino/Redmond conspiracy but in reality the only platforms Flash actually ran with anything close to decent performance was on Cupertino/Redmond operating systems, OSX and Windows. On Linux and Android it was unusably slow and Adobe continually failed to improve it, how do you think they would have got on if they also had to maintain an iOS version?
To be quite frank, a lot of the reason why you don't get many young women in STEM - and Open Source projects - is you insist they have lots of experience.
Who insists they have lots of experience? If you submit a patch to an open source project you don't attach your resume to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, I know it's not US carriers yet. But when (if) it is, he's essentially just saying "Ubuntu puts the control back into the hands of Verizon Wireless, at&t, T-Mobile and Sprint."
How exactly are you inferring that? He isn't saying that at all, it clearly says: Canonical has partnered with BQ in Europe and Meizu in China and neither of these partners is a carrier, they are device manufacturers.
The problem is you a minority not worth catering for, even those few who do share your viewpoint are mostly served by a phone with CyanogenMOD anyway.
People generally need a reason to switch platforms. So far almost everything from open source that hasn't been on the server side has been about how the product is "just as good" as the closed source equivalent. Do the open source advocates really think I'm going to switch platforms over something that is "just as good" with no clear advantages?
What they think is that "software freedom" is the advantage, that people should be willing to give up convenience for freedom, for example running their own "cloud" services so they do their computing on their computer rather than using somebody elses.
Many of them still don't understand one simple thing that everybody else knows - and it's pretty obvious - which is that you cannot disrupt a market with a me-too product. You need either a disruptive product to change an existing market or a new and innovative product to create a new market. The FOSS world was still fumbling in the desktop market and vendors like RIM and then Apple innovated in the smartphone market, there's no reason that innovation could not have come from the FOSS community but they are now - years later - still trying to play catch up. The same thing happened in the tablet market and I don't see it being successful because it just isn't disruptive or innovative, it's just a free copy and often it is less convenient and/or less user friendly. FOSS solutions - I'm talking user-facing, not all the brilliant backend stuff - need to innovate to get over the stigma of them just being also-ran knock-offs.
Windows Phone is not a viable alternative, it's a complete joke
I didn't find anything objectively wrong with it. I've tried it and quite liked it but at the time (WP7) it lacked a few features I needed but performance was excellent, with Android it was flexible but the performance was awful - though I've seen this has improved in the last 2 years or so - and ultimately I settled on iOS as it had the features and performance while being limited in terms of hardware choice. I found all 3 platforms are very good so I can't understand how supposedly objective people can have such strong opinions for/against any of them outside of some ideological opinion or specific personal needs without actually basing it on factual details.
No, what sucks is that there's no search bar where I can type "Printers" or "ODBC" and there pops up the appropriate Control Panel or Administrator functions.
Sure there is, Windows Key + S. A search bar slides out and you can type "Printers" and you'll get the control panel Devices & Printers pane as one of the results, same as hitting the Windows Key and start typing in Windows 7.
For some reason, there's a concerted campaign happening to try to convince people that Google has locked up Android. It's an odd thing to pretend, and I'm wondering what their motive is?
No it is that people are realising that 'Open Source' and 'Free Software' are not the same thing. If Google wants to put a proprietary layer atop Android that's fine, Android itself is still 'Open Source' even if you have proprietary applications requiring proprietary APIs running on it. In addition the development process is closed, you don't see the development branch for the next version even though it is being actively worked on unless you are part of the OHA, which isn't necessarily a problem but it's another element that differs from traditional 'Open Source' models. It is people being pedantic but also pointing out that things aren't as open as you might think they are, previously everything was open, now some old open things have been replaced with closed ones and some new things are closed...Does this matter to you? maybe. Does this matter to most people? Probably not. Will this impact companies looking to leverage the existing Android user base? Probably.
Google hasn't locked up Android, they have only locked up the stock applications and the new application services platform. Which is really out of necessity since they need a revenue stream from somewhere and by keeping it open it is easy for anybody to cut off that revenue stream or redirect it.
How does Google's implementation not fit the "classic" open source model?
At a guess I would say the development process. Where's the development branch being worked on for the next version of AOSP?
But is it any worse than the iron grip apple has on IOS?
Yes, because while Apple holds a dictatorship over iOS that does mean that you don't end up with a bunch of incompatible versions. Your "Android apps" won't run on Amazon's Android or Aliyun's Android if they require proprietary (or even open but unimplemented) APIs only present in Google's Android and vice versa.
How exactly does this preclude interoperability? Even in cases like office suites where you have proprietary products that aren't forks of a free programs (MS Office and iWork), a SaaS model in Google Docs and free options like Libre and Open Office there are people interoperating. In some cases you can end up with formatting problems but this is an extreme case where the products in question aren't even derived from the same code base at all yet allow for interoperability.
And even if the proprietary version was an incompatible fork why would people to move to a system that didn't allow them to interoperate if interoperability was important?
Did anyone notice that Microsoft is in the process of buying a company that is rumored to have an unreleased Android phone?
FTFY.
I think that was pretty much the argument against companies forking Android, if you want application compatibility then for the most part you are going to have to reverse-engineer and re-implement your own version of the entire GMS, the proprietary closed-source layer of applications and services that sits on top of AOSP.
because no one cares enough about their platform to write "native" (read: HTML5) crapps for it.
Native apps for it aren't HTML5, they are .Net, Windows Phone Runtime and/or Direct3D/Win32/COM (subsets) developed in C#, VB, C++/CX and/or C++.
A lot of the Android ones are too - not so much on iOS though, maybe they get rejected - and have you ever tried searching "fart" on the Android app store? It's fucking pages and pages and pages long, rubbish like that certainly pads it out. Not saying Windows doesn't have the same issue, maybe it does, but saying "hey it has 1.1 million apps" is a pretty pointless metric.
they denied modified software to be run on their system.
Ah but it is not their system, you bought it, it's your system. Now I understand the case where software is licensed rather than sold but hardware is sold, not licensed and you can do whatever you want with it, but of course if it is restricted by proprietary software - say a bootloader - that is licensed rather than sold then you may have a hard time doing that. Though that does not mean you couldn't replace the ROM containing the bootloader because it is your hardware, but that's probably more trouble than it's worth.
The purpose of GPLv3's section 6 is to compel them to enable and instruct the user on how to install it on the system. The same clause exists in AGPL. The question remains: Does not owning hardware circumvent the clause?
Yes, because it relates to a "User Product" which a Tivo is but - for example - a cloud-based render farm is not.
Considering that AGPL(v3, the FSF version) is based on GPLv3 and features the same anti-TiVoization article (nr. 6), please explain why you think it's still subject to TiVoization
I didn't say it was Tivoization I said it is the element of it that you cannot necessarily make use of the code. I can get Tivo's code and theoretically use Tivo's code in compatible system if one existed, but I can't replace the code on the Tivo with my own modified version, just like I could use the code from a cloud-based render farm service but I can't replace the code on that render farm with my own modified version.
why does ownership of the machine matter?
Because if the target platform is custom hardware and you own it you can theoretically run software on it, if the platform is custom hardware and you don't own it then how are you going to run software on it? Can you run software on my computer? No.
Do you think that the license cannot compel the service provider to allow upload of modified software?
I don't see anything in the license that does that.
You've never played Star Wars: The Old Republic, have you.
I have actually, what information exactly should I have gleaned from playing it that you believe I haven't?
The majority of the problems they've had with development has been wrangling their 3rd party game engine to fit their game concept.
I suppose they made a bad choice then.
Continuing development of the original won't be terribly useful when the majority of users have moved on to the new incompatible proprietary version...
Why not? Aren't you developing it because you want to use it?
By continuing development you will have to reinvent the wheel to duplicate any changes in the proprietary version
If the proprietary version didn't exist you would still have to do that work to develop those features anyway.
Plus a proprietary version is likely to have a much bigger marketing budget, and thus the lions share of end users, and with proprietary changes making it ever harder to use the original open version.
Why does it matter whether that version has more users? I don't use a program because of the amount of other people that use it, I use it because it serves my needs.
They still exist, but are often used for student projects and tech demos. Building the game engine and the associated tech demos to show it off is the (relatively) easy part. Creating a decent game with proper art assets, animation, music, voice actors, level design and a good storyline with well-developed characters is the hard part. It requires a lot more effort than collaboratively building application middleware and many studios prefer to use proven commercial engines like UE, iD tech, CryEngine, Source, etc... that are artifacts of actually building a commercial game rather than building just an engine.
I'm not saying these things are essential for all games but often for notable ones and in the case of simple games it is often not worth the effort to learn/use an engine that has so many features you aren't going to need.
The AGPL has the same problem that the GPLv2 has which was solved by the GPLv3, essentially Tivoization in which you can get access to the code but you can't necessarily make use of it and since you don't get the binary distribution or run it yourself you can never verify it anyway or verify that there isn't some other software involved at some point. That is always going to be fighting a losing battle because it is a case where end users want to do their computing on computers that they do not control and which do not belong to them.
Ok but where is this actually happening? People have been raving on about this for decades in the restrictive vs permissive license debate. Restrictive cuts off collaboration with proprietary vendors and permissive relies on proprietary vendors contributing back voluntarily. There's always the anti-permissive doom-and-gloom scenarios but when have they ever actually played out like that? And even if they did you could just fork the permissive codebase to a restrictive one which would cut off the proprietary vendors and just continue on as before without that collaboration.
This attack vector, used by aggressive vendors who want to kill open competition, is what the GPL was intended to prevent.
Which "aggressive vendors" have done this? Even the most locked-down ones like Apple have contributed back and made their sources available, not only to the free software community but even to their direct competitors. Look at Webkit, Darwin, Clang/LLVM, CUPS, OpenSSL, etc...
But even then RMS is opposed to the very existence of LLVM just because it is a project that competes with GCC but does not share his ideology and he does not want to allow collaboration between free software and proprietary software developers which he makes quite clear and that sort of zealotry should be discouraged:
"The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers -- so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us."
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html
BSD code works much the same way, you have more freedom with the initial version but there's nothing to stop future versions offering you no freedom whatsoever.
So just use the original version or fork that original version and continue development. The BSD license does not force you to contribute everything you do back (it is your choice what and how much you contribute back), and really that's the way it should be IMHO, it should be about people collaborating because they see a benefit in doing it, not because they are forced to do it. Permissive licenses allow those who may not share the same ideology in its entirety to collaborate to at least some degree whereas restrictive licenses force their ideology and an exclusion policy like that is not productive.
RMS himself said the reason he does not like LLVM is because "all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us", if you don't accept his ideology in its entirety he won't help you, that is just religious extremism. It allows free and proprietary vendors to work together and RMS is directly opposed to that collaboration.
...also don't resort to argumentum ad absurdum by comparing the freedom to distribute source code to the freedom to torture and murder people, that's just silliness.
BSD gives the author freedom, but screws the user. (1-1=0)
If I use a BSD-licensed program how does that "screw the user"?
It does NOT do the same jobs that Flash did, especially web animation and gaming
In what way? As far as gaming is concerned Stage3D and WebGL are very similar but native is further ahead as you can take advantage of specific platform and hardware features.
What has HTML V5 given us? It has given us a billion proprietary apps to allow the same content that before could have been accessed by any browser with Flash
But that would mean that you couldn't make use of any platform-specific features or hardware optimizations until Adobe added them to Flash, that's a horrible situation to be in. For example Stage3D does not support OpenGLES 3.0 but the iPhone5s does as does particular hardware on Android 4.3+. Not to mention there would be no consistent UI design.
it has given us a "standard" that is being pretty much controlled by Cupertino and Redmond who are pushing for DRM and other nasty shit that won't work on any platform but theirs, and it has given us websites that run like absolute shit on anything but the latest and greatest CPUs
Hang on, on the one hand you're saying it's all a big Cupertino/Redmond conspiracy but in reality the only platforms Flash actually ran with anything close to decent performance was on Cupertino/Redmond operating systems, OSX and Windows. On Linux and Android it was unusably slow and Adobe continually failed to improve it, how do you think they would have got on if they also had to maintain an iOS version?
To be quite frank, a lot of the reason why you don't get many young women in STEM - and Open Source projects - is you insist they have lots of experience.
Who insists they have lots of experience? If you submit a patch to an open source project you don't attach your resume to it.