How quickly people forget what smartphones were like before the iPhone.
Who cares? The iPhone was built from the products and innovation of others just as post-iPhone products have built upon the innovation of it, look at the similarities across the dumbphones of different manufacturers of years past, or how Motorola's invention of the flip phone spawned so many others of that form factor from different manufacturers, or the common "menu button -> grid of icons" workflow that ended up spreading to virtually every phone (not sure who had that first and it doesn't matter anyway), nobody cares so why do some people get so anal about Apple?
Who really gives a fuck? Unless they start calling it an iphone and calling themselves apple it doesn't matter and it certainly doesn't matter to end users.
That's about as much evidence as you need to see that free sharing of information and the FOSS movement is going virtually nowhere. You can't even make products that look similar to other products and the funny thing is it even angers people that aren't associated with the companies in question, why do such people get so emotional and angry about that? What sort of person buys a device and ends up so defined by their ownership of it that they get angry when another company makes something that looks similar?
Windows Store is "a built-in mechanism for getting software onto" a Surface or other Windows RT tablet "when really no other mechanism existed" without obtaining a developer license.
What's your point? The platform itself hasn't been successful so obviously the application store isn't going to be (well it probably is successful within the scope of the minuscule RT user base but not compared to anything else).
Besides, another mechanism existed since the dawn of Android, apart from a few AT&T handsets for six months: loading APKs through "Unknown sources".
Which is not and never has been applicable to mainstream.
Seems like something morons say, if that was the case then it suggests nobody is capable of competing, all these companies are suing and counter-suing eachother.
Is it Intel or ARM?
If it's Intel, it won't run any Android native apps, and if it's Arm it won't run most Windows apps.
That's statement not true.... ...It runs most android apps, some won't run however.
The ones it won't run are native apps, which naturally will not run because native apps by definition are bound to the architecture they were built for.
When iOS 2 was released, the App Store had no user base. When Android 1.0 was released, Android Market had no user base. How did these manage to gain a user base while Ubuntu Software Center and Windows Store have failed?
Because they provided a built-in mechanism for getting software onto the respective platforms when really no other mechanism existed. Ubuntu Software Center and Windows Store are just another way to get software onto Ubuntu and Windows respectively.
Because defining a market based on whether a specific activity is convenient on a particular system based on a design decision has no relation to market power in anti-trust law.
It shows that for a large class of people who use a machine for purposes more involved than Facebook and YouTube, an iPad or an Android tablet is no substitute for a PC running Windows.
It shows nothing, being intentionally obtuse will not help your argument. When I'm working in an IDE I always use it fullscreen, video editing, audio editing, photo editing, gaming and obviously innumerable other tasks are most often done fullscreen (often spread across multiple screens) and are clearly 'more involved than Facebook or YouTube' so don't be an idiot. Yes you can come up with examples of where it might be useful or convenient rather than a fullscreen environment, but that is tangential to the topic of market power and is irrelevant.
You try getting work done in a task that uses multiple applications if the only window management policy available to you is all maximized all the time.
Irrelevant.
That depends on what happens in April 2014 when just about every remaining Windows XP PC connected to the Internet gets 0wn3d through a vulnerability that shall remain forever unpatched. What do you think is most likely to replace, or replace Windows XP on, the 38% of PCs that run Windows XP (same source)?
No it doesn't, in the old days when they had significant market power they never had to wait for an OS to go out of support to see significant adoption of the new one. And as for your hypothetical, even if that did happen, it's equally likely they won't get replaced or maybe they'll be replaced with Macs or Linux systems or iPads or Android tablets, Microsoft has no power to force them to be upgraded to Windows 8 - we've even seen entire governments switch away from Windows.
Consider the major personal computing operating systems that allow showing more than one application's window on the screen at a time.
If you're using narrow definitions of markets like that then everybody has a monopoly in a particular market.
Windows has such a supermajority of usage share that it arguably has market power.
No 'Windows' has no market power, it is a product. Microsoft on the other hand - being a company - could have significant market power, however the dismal adoption of Windows 8 proves that they no longer do, unlike in previous years.
You can't turn off SecureBoot on ARM-based surfaces, only on Intel-based ones (eg. Surface Pro).
The article speaks about Windows 8 which doesn't run on ARM-based devices (the version that runs on ARM is called Windows RT), so what you're saying is irrelevant.
You did notice I said the only disadvantage right? I'm willing to stipulate even that might not be a problem in many cases, such as with proprietary freeware. So, with that stipulation you have no objections to what I said?
In that case I think you mean it's a potential disadvantage with proprietary software, although it's also a potential disadvantage with free software (not freeware) too as you can charge for free software. If that is indeed what you meant then yes you're right.
Your response didn't really make any sense, so I had to try and assume what you meant.
And what was it that you assumed I meant?
Perhaps you'd like to make yourself clearer
Ok, what you wrote was:
But for javascript the only disadvantage to proprietary code is that the owner of the website has to pay to use it.
However that statement doesn't make sense because proprietary (and free) software isn't about cost, for example I don't have to pay to use proprietary freeware.
Huh? Did you read what I wrote and the quoted passage I was responding to? Your reply suggests you didn't. Perhaps you should try and explain the point you think I was trying to make.
RMS and the FSF hve been pretty upfront about their goals since the beginning and these have not changed.
That's the problem, computing has changed though. They only care about the code running on the computer you own, which is why this is only about client-side Java, so I wondered if you moved all of that to the server and just had a FOSS thin client that basically just had to display pixels and send input (kind of OnLive style) that would be ok? Or if you used a free client to remote into a server you don't own and run the non-free software there?
If we had a choice to use the web site without the script that "the author licensed [...] that way", it'd be fine. But a lot of pages that use non-free JavaScript won't work at all with script off.
Then don't view the website, you don't have the right to force them into your ideology. And if you must view it then do it on a computer other than your own.
Does this downloaded copy of the JS code come with a license that secures the four essential freedoms to users? Usually it doesn't unless you're on GNU.org or a MediaWiki site.
If the author licensed it that way then yes, if not then obviously it wouldn't and absolutely shouldn't.
No, having to submit the code of your website for review to stallman (or some affiliated group) just to get on this whitelist is a stupid idea and then what happens if you modify it? Submit it again?
So how about a free software license at the top of free software javascript programs that you could check for, if it has that then it is free software and you can inspect the code or do whatever and allow it to run if you are satisfied. That leaves it up to the code author to make the decision.
he has a perfectly valid point about how the effect of non-Free licenses, combined with minified (and therefore effectively unreadable) code, especially that which uses dynamically constructed elements, is hard to read, hard to share and hard for the community to improve.
He has a perfectly valid point within the scope of his ideology but of course this ends up having the 'tivoization' problem anyway, and even if you get around that are you really going to maintain your own forks of javascript programs for individual websites?
Obviously a concern about using non-free software on the web is broadly non-existent, most people use webmail as well as 'cloud' storage and applications and they have no control there at all, so if you're ok with that (and the vast majority are) then when it comes to running javascript programs you're best off just sandboxing the javascript program when you run it, especially given many are going to call out to APIs running on other systems anyway.
I just don't see the practicality of this, you're not going to download and analyze every javascript program on every website you visit and if people want to release their javascript programs in a non-minified form and under a free license they are already free to do so.
I think you may be confused with the Open Source Initiative (who have never actually accomplished anything of note interestingly enough); the FSF has been bluntly pushing the whole "proprietary software is immoral" ideology from the beginning, nothing has changed on that front.
I agree, I remember Bruce Perens pointing out that the only real point of difference between him and Richard Stallman in terms of ideology was that whilst he believed Free and non-Free Software should co-exist Stallman believes everything should only ever be Free Software.
Well the primary driver in virtually all cases is price, you save on the upfront license costs. Now obviously anybody responsible for such a switch in any size organization is going to wonder how such a model is funded - I mean programmers, like any other industry, can't be expected to work for free outside of hobbyist contributions - so then you find out that the monetization side is based around support contracts, training and contracting (or maintaining in-house) development of new features. Money has to flow into the industry somehow so you can see how people would be skeptical about a 'free-of-charge' product funded by additional after-sales (if you can really call it that) costs.
Slashdot Mirror
How quickly people forget what smartphones were like before the iPhone.
Who cares? The iPhone was built from the products and innovation of others just as post-iPhone products have built upon the innovation of it, look at the similarities across the dumbphones of different manufacturers of years past, or how Motorola's invention of the flip phone spawned so many others of that form factor from different manufacturers, or the common "menu button -> grid of icons" workflow that ended up spreading to virtually every phone (not sure who had that first and it doesn't matter anyway), nobody cares so why do some people get so anal about Apple?
Who really gives a fuck? Unless they start calling it an iphone and calling themselves apple it doesn't matter and it certainly doesn't matter to end users.
Plenty of things like the following exist:
http://samsungcopiesapple.tumblr.com/
That's about as much evidence as you need to see that free sharing of information and the FOSS movement is going virtually nowhere. You can't even make products that look similar to other products and the funny thing is it even angers people that aren't associated with the companies in question, why do such people get so emotional and angry about that? What sort of person buys a device and ends up so defined by their ownership of it that they get angry when another company makes something that looks similar?
Windows Store is "a built-in mechanism for getting software onto" a Surface or other Windows RT tablet "when really no other mechanism existed" without obtaining a developer license.
What's your point? The platform itself hasn't been successful so obviously the application store isn't going to be (well it probably is successful within the scope of the minuscule RT user base but not compared to anything else).
Besides, another mechanism existed since the dawn of Android, apart from a few AT&T handsets for six months: loading APKs through "Unknown sources".
Which is not and never has been applicable to mainstream.
.. those who can't compete, litigate.
Seems like something morons say, if that was the case then it suggests nobody is capable of competing, all these companies are suing and counter-suing eachother.
Is it Intel or ARM? If it's Intel, it won't run any Android native apps, and if it's Arm it won't run most Windows apps.
That's statement not true. ...
...It runs most android apps, some won't run however.
The ones it won't run are native apps, which naturally will not run because native apps by definition are bound to the architecture they were built for.
When iOS 2 was released, the App Store had no user base. When Android 1.0 was released, Android Market had no user base. How did these manage to gain a user base while Ubuntu Software Center and Windows Store have failed?
Because they provided a built-in mechanism for getting software onto the respective platforms when really no other mechanism existed. Ubuntu Software Center and Windows Store are just another way to get software onto Ubuntu and Windows respectively.
How is it irrelevant?
Because defining a market based on whether a specific activity is convenient on a particular system based on a design decision has no relation to market power in anti-trust law.
It shows that for a large class of people who use a machine for purposes more involved than Facebook and YouTube, an iPad or an Android tablet is no substitute for a PC running Windows.
It shows nothing, being intentionally obtuse will not help your argument. When I'm working in an IDE I always use it fullscreen, video editing, audio editing, photo editing, gaming and obviously innumerable other tasks are most often done fullscreen (often spread across multiple screens) and are clearly 'more involved than Facebook or YouTube' so don't be an idiot. Yes you can come up with examples of where it might be useful or convenient rather than a fullscreen environment, but that is tangential to the topic of market power and is irrelevant.
You try getting work done in a task that uses multiple applications if the only window management policy available to you is all maximized all the time.
Irrelevant.
That depends on what happens in April 2014 when just about every remaining Windows XP PC connected to the Internet gets 0wn3d through a vulnerability that shall remain forever unpatched. What do you think is most likely to replace, or replace Windows XP on, the 38% of PCs that run Windows XP (same source)?
No it doesn't, in the old days when they had significant market power they never had to wait for an OS to go out of support to see significant adoption of the new one. And as for your hypothetical, even if that did happen, it's equally likely they won't get replaced or maybe they'll be replaced with Macs or Linux systems or iPads or Android tablets, Microsoft has no power to force them to be upgraded to Windows 8 - we've even seen entire governments switch away from Windows.
Consider the major personal computing operating systems that allow showing more than one application's window on the screen at a time.
If you're using narrow definitions of markets like that then everybody has a monopoly in a particular market.
Windows has such a supermajority of usage share that it arguably has market power.
No 'Windows' has no market power, it is a product. Microsoft on the other hand - being a company - could have significant market power, however the dismal adoption of Windows 8 proves that they no longer do, unlike in previous years.
We don't know if it's an ARM system
If it was an ARM system it wouldn't be running Windows 8.
You can't turn off SecureBoot on ARM-based surfaces, only on Intel-based ones (eg. Surface Pro).
The article speaks about Windows 8 which doesn't run on ARM-based devices (the version that runs on ARM is called Windows RT), so what you're saying is irrelevant.
You did notice I said the only disadvantage right? I'm willing to stipulate even that might not be a problem in many cases, such as with proprietary freeware. So, with that stipulation you have no objections to what I said?
In that case I think you mean it's a potential disadvantage with proprietary software, although it's also a potential disadvantage with free software (not freeware) too as you can charge for free software. If that is indeed what you meant then yes you're right.
Your response didn't really make any sense, so I had to try and assume what you meant.
And what was it that you assumed I meant?
Perhaps you'd like to make yourself clearer
Ok, what you wrote was:
But for javascript the only disadvantage to proprietary code is that the owner of the website has to pay to use it.
However that statement doesn't make sense because proprietary (and free) software isn't about cost, for example I don't have to pay to use proprietary freeware.
Huh? Did you read what I wrote and the quoted passage I was responding to? Your reply suggests you didn't. Perhaps you should try and explain the point you think I was trying to make.
But for javascript the only disadvantage to proprietary code is that the owner of the website has to pay to use it.
Why? The difference between Free and Proprietary software has nothing to do with cost.
RMS and the FSF hve been pretty upfront about their goals since the beginning and these have not changed.
That's the problem, computing has changed though. They only care about the code running on the computer you own, which is why this is only about client-side Java, so I wondered if you moved all of that to the server and just had a FOSS thin client that basically just had to display pixels and send input (kind of OnLive style) that would be ok? Or if you used a free client to remote into a server you don't own and run the non-free software there?
If we had a choice to use the web site without the script that "the author licensed [...] that way", it'd be fine. But a lot of pages that use non-free JavaScript won't work at all with script off.
Then don't view the website, you don't have the right to force them into your ideology. And if you must view it then do it on a computer other than your own.
Does this downloaded copy of the JS code come with a license that secures the four essential freedoms to users? Usually it doesn't unless you're on GNU.org or a MediaWiki site.
If the author licensed it that way then yes, if not then obviously it wouldn't and absolutely shouldn't.
Is this the sanest way of approaching this?
No, having to submit the code of your website for review to stallman (or some affiliated group) just to get on this whitelist is a stupid idea and then what happens if you modify it? Submit it again?
So how about a free software license at the top of free software javascript programs that you could check for, if it has that then it is free software and you can inspect the code or do whatever and allow it to run if you are satisfied. That leaves it up to the code author to make the decision.
he has a perfectly valid point about how the effect of non-Free licenses, combined with minified (and therefore effectively unreadable) code, especially that which uses dynamically constructed elements, is hard to read, hard to share and hard for the community to improve.
He has a perfectly valid point within the scope of his ideology but of course this ends up having the 'tivoization' problem anyway, and even if you get around that are you really going to maintain your own forks of javascript programs for individual websites?
Obviously a concern about using non-free software on the web is broadly non-existent, most people use webmail as well as 'cloud' storage and applications and they have no control there at all, so if you're ok with that (and the vast majority are) then when it comes to running javascript programs you're best off just sandboxing the javascript program when you run it, especially given many are going to call out to APIs running on other systems anyway.
I just don't see the practicality of this, you're not going to download and analyze every javascript program on every website you visit and if people want to release their javascript programs in a non-minified form and under a free license they are already free to do so.
If I see 'minified' code I assume it's malware.
wow, i'm sure that's really accurate too.
I think you may be confused with the Open Source Initiative (who have never actually accomplished anything of note interestingly enough); the FSF has been bluntly pushing the whole "proprietary software is immoral" ideology from the beginning, nothing has changed on that front.
I agree, I remember Bruce Perens pointing out that the only real point of difference between him and Richard Stallman in terms of ideology was that whilst he believed Free and non-Free Software should co-exist Stallman believes everything should only ever be Free Software.
I'm not sure why people don't switch.
Well the primary driver in virtually all cases is price, you save on the upfront license costs. Now obviously anybody responsible for such a switch in any size organization is going to wonder how such a model is funded - I mean programmers, like any other industry, can't be expected to work for free outside of hobbyist contributions - so then you find out that the monetization side is based around support contracts, training and contracting (or maintaining in-house) development of new features. Money has to flow into the industry somehow so you can see how people would be skeptical about a 'free-of-charge' product funded by additional after-sales (if you can really call it that) costs.