Saddly, the phones have their own problems:
- they eat batteries like candy (even wireless credit card transaction are remotely powered by the terminal. Whereas a dead phone is dead and can't be used for paying).
- again, they are conencted. Which means that they could be compromised themselves. (Specially since people tend to install tons of crap).
Not to mention they are supposed to be connected but if you don't have reception or there is an interruption to cell service you can't pay.
Will they cater to us old fogey (32 yr olds) that don't want to be tied to carrying a phone everywhere ?
Who are you talking about that you are concerned won't cater to you? I don't think there is any such Apple Pay/Google Wallet compatible terminal that doesn't accept card transactions.
I agree. But these naysayers have kept telling me that a PC game developer won't get an audience even with content because effectively all the audience for local multiplayer content are console users.
Well obviously you can't just put out the same experience that console users already get. Obviously it needs to be good content that people actually want, yet-another-local-multiplayer-game is not going to win anybody over because you can't disrupt the status quo with an unimaginative "me too" offering. Why buy title X and move my PC into the lounge when I can just play title Y on my console? Well you have to provide that reason.
This is the same reason Ouya failed, all they provided was a platform and were banging on about having things like TwitchTV and Minecraft and Android games like everybody else so why would anybody buy one? The idea was that developers would create the reason to buy one but instead developers just waited to see if anybody else invest first and so Ouya died.
"it does not respect the UNIX way of doing things" IS a valid technical argument.
What exactly is "the UNIX way" of doing things? Because in looking at the existing UNIX-derived operating systems like AIX or HPUX and the UNIX-certified ones like OSX this move to systemd (whether you like it or not) certainly does seem to be in keeping with the UNIX way of doing things.
Perhaps what you mean is that you're complaining that it isn't doing things the way UNIX did them 20-odd years ago, which may well be a valid complaint but calling that "the UNIX way of doing things" doesn't give much confidence that you know what you're talking about. If that's what you mean and that's how you prefer it to be then certainly your preference is a valid complaint to take onboard.
A bunch of Slashdot users over the past several years have been repeatedly telling me that almost nobody is willing to do that.
Of course nobody is willing to do that, there is no advantage or reason to do it. But it is extremely easy to do if some reason to do it came about, like a decent game that required it or was made more enjoyable by it.
You aren't going to get an audience without content.
No, like I said, the initial naming was good. It was Free. Free as in beer, free as in speech. That one word worked perfectly.
I think it's terrible since obviously there could be software that was free of charge but not free of restriction so using one word to mean two things was always going to be confusing. Naturally software that was free of charge would be referred to as free software just like anything else that usually has a cost associated with it but is offered free of charge.
In the context of speech "free speech" obviously means free of restriction because speech does not have a cost associated with it. In the context of beer "free beer" obviously means free of charge, everybody knows that you aren't entitled to go to the manufacturer and get the recipe to make it. So the term "free software" could mean free of charge or free of restriction or both.
Even if you play it that way, you're still proving my point. If Google didn't figure you using those services into the price of the device, then they would charge the OEM for licensing the Android trademark, which means the manufacturer would charge you more money for the phone.
The question was "What platform for independent development can easily be connected to a TV?".
Lots, including the PC. Now obviously the next question is why would you want to connect it to a TV, the answer would be that there are games (like local multiplayer ones with controller support) that people want to play that benefit from it.
I'm pretty sure that has been tried (by others) and did not hold up in court.
I don't see any reason it couldn't - if you have examples though that your assertion is based on I'd be interested to see because I can't find anything - you can specify license constraints on linkage so certainly there is nothing to stop restrictions being placed on the license of the input to GCC.
How do you propose they prevent GCC from producing propriety software?
Make it a term of the license for the software.
I'm sure there's plenty of case law wherein a toolmaker has tried to claim that use of their tool gives them rights to the things created with that tool, and have been shut down.
Right, but this isn't about giving the GCC authors the rights to the programs created with GCC.
Ouya fizzled because it was the answer to a question nobody asked. There are many platforms for independent development that already exist so yet another entry into the lowend was really not going to be successful. Being based on Android was in some ways advantageous but really that was the nail in its coffin, it was easy for developers to just develop an Android game and publish it independently, publish it to Google Play and publish it on the OUYA store so OUYA had no exclusivity, no reason to buy it. It was just a low-powered Android box tethered to your TV that had no "killer feature".
But Stallman's playing the long game. The cost is too high. Candy today, chains tomorrow.
So why not prevent GCC from being used to produce proprietary software? It seems pretty hypocritical to prevent the export of GCC's abstract source tree due to the fact that it could be used to aid closed-source software when GCC itself is used to produce closed-source software all the time.
Actually no. The disruptive aspect was supposed to be price and pace of development.
I suppose that's a fair assessment, ultimately price didn't matter since OEM licenses for Windows were so cheap that people wouldn't even notice the cost built in to the PC and while there has always been a lot of development going on it hasn't been particularly unified so there is a lot of duplicated effort in order to do a bunch of things in slightly different ways.
I'm guessing what he is referring to is the ongoing debate developers are having with Stallman over accessibility to GCC's abstract syntax tree. Many developers want this in order to be able to do auto-complete, refactoring and other IDE options within programs like EMACS but Stallman is concerned that this could lead to that abstract source tree (AST) being used as input to proprietary compiler backends, which he sees as bad.
This is another page in the book of hamstringing GCC and EMACS users in the name of freedom, or rather of trying to prevent a perceived threat from closed-source programs. We have already seen the long debates about plugins for GCC which ultimately ended with it being doable so long as it exports the symbol plugin_is_GPL_compatible and as David Engster already said, a GPL plugin for GCC could already be written to extract the AST if that's what compiler backend authors wanted to do.
Does it really matter? I mean Free Software doesn't want proprietary developers standing on their shoulders so they have the GPL to force their position, proprietary product developers don't want Free Software leveraging all the work they have done creating their hardware platform so they lock it down.
If we want Free Software on these kinds of products then the Free Software movement is going to have to address the fact that there is no platform on which to run. Proprietary product companies went out and developed or licensed their own platforms so the Free Software movement needs to do the same.
The dedication to pushing a free desktop is admirable, but it takes a disruptive product to effect real change in an established market. The disruptive aspect of it was supposed to be "freedom" but that wasn't enough. As you highlighted, the new smartphone and tablet categories still don't have entrants from the free software community so in that area it's another case of trying to play catch-up with the only ace up your sleeve being the freedom card.
With these new 'device' categories it is even harder because nobody sells a 'blank' device - a generic platform like the PC on to which you can load any operating system - nor can you easily turn most existing ones into that. Unless an OEM comes along happy to set a platform specification and sell blank platforms (like Raspberry Pi but obviously more easily integratable into small form factors) I don't see much progress here. The only way is to leverage the proprietary vendor platforms and hijack those with some innovative and disruptive alternative.
Their open-source contributions have always seemed to me to be letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law.
Their open source contributions seem to be in the spirit of open source rather than the letter-of-the-law, as you say they aren't legally required to release their contributions but they do anyway. Sure they aren't releasing the source to everything that the code is linked with like restrictive free software licensing enforces but that's the great thing about permissive open source, it allows free and proprietary authors to work together and leaves the choice of what contributions to make up to the author and not restrict other authors. Whereas restrictive open source licensing is a "my way or the highway" approach.
You can't build Mac apps on Darwin alone, which is why it makes sense to say that "Darwin is open source" but OS X is not.
I would certainly agree with that. I was only disputing that the parts of BSD that Apple did fork have become proprietary - because they haven't - they have formed the open source basis upon which Apple's proprietary frameworks are built.
which was based on MACH, which was derived from BSD
Mach was developed as a replacement kernel for the existing kernel in BSD operating systems. But that's neither here nor there, of course it has many BSD components but the idea that it was "proprietary forking" is nonsense, the parts derived from BSD and Mach exist in Darwin which is open source.
Obviously. Apple also didn't take "BSD and used it as their operating system", they did however use parts of the BSD kernel in their open source XNU kernel. There may also be BSD parts used in their open source operating system called Darwin. But there was no "proprietary forking", you can freely get and use the source code.
What he means is that they in fact used some parts of the FreeBSD kernel combined with the Mach kernel to create the open source XNU kernel that is used in their operating systems.
but there's also no end to the small one-person projects that can be done, and people can and do make a living like that, here in 2015.
Yet even some of the most popular projects that are used by both FOSS and proprietary products and companies are woefully under-resourced (OpenSSL) and underfunded (GPG).
Slashdot Mirror
This is because the EFT terminal needs to contact the bank.
You mean the few hundred millisecond roundtrip via the network.
Saddly, the phones have their own problems: - they eat batteries like candy (even wireless credit card transaction are remotely powered by the terminal. Whereas a dead phone is dead and can't be used for paying). - again, they are conencted. Which means that they could be compromised themselves. (Specially since people tend to install tons of crap).
Not to mention they are supposed to be connected but if you don't have reception or there is an interruption to cell service you can't pay.
When other people pay with credit card or debit card or their phones, it ends up taking at least 30 seconds.
Maybe if you're used to antiquated payment card methods but with NFC it's not like that at all.
Will they cater to us old fogey (32 yr olds) that don't want to be tied to carrying a phone everywhere ?
Who are you talking about that you are concerned won't cater to you? I don't think there is any such Apple Pay/Google Wallet compatible terminal that doesn't accept card transactions.
I agree. But these naysayers have kept telling me that a PC game developer won't get an audience even with content because effectively all the audience for local multiplayer content are console users.
Well obviously you can't just put out the same experience that console users already get. Obviously it needs to be good content that people actually want, yet-another-local-multiplayer-game is not going to win anybody over because you can't disrupt the status quo with an unimaginative "me too" offering. Why buy title X and move my PC into the lounge when I can just play title Y on my console? Well you have to provide that reason.
This is the same reason Ouya failed, all they provided was a platform and were banging on about having things like TwitchTV and Minecraft and Android games like everybody else so why would anybody buy one? The idea was that developers would create the reason to buy one but instead developers just waited to see if anybody else invest first and so Ouya died.
"it does not respect the UNIX way of doing things" IS a valid technical argument.
What exactly is "the UNIX way" of doing things? Because in looking at the existing UNIX-derived operating systems like AIX or HPUX and the UNIX-certified ones like OSX this move to systemd (whether you like it or not) certainly does seem to be in keeping with the UNIX way of doing things.
Perhaps what you mean is that you're complaining that it isn't doing things the way UNIX did them 20-odd years ago, which may well be a valid complaint but calling that "the UNIX way of doing things" doesn't give much confidence that you know what you're talking about. If that's what you mean and that's how you prefer it to be then certainly your preference is a valid complaint to take onboard.
A bunch of Slashdot users over the past several years have been repeatedly telling me that almost nobody is willing to do that.
Of course nobody is willing to do that, there is no advantage or reason to do it. But it is extremely easy to do if some reason to do it came about, like a decent game that required it or was made more enjoyable by it.
You aren't going to get an audience without content.
No, like I said, the initial naming was good. It was Free. Free as in beer, free as in speech. That one word worked perfectly.
I think it's terrible since obviously there could be software that was free of charge but not free of restriction so using one word to mean two things was always going to be confusing. Naturally software that was free of charge would be referred to as free software just like anything else that usually has a cost associated with it but is offered free of charge.
In the context of speech "free speech" obviously means free of restriction because speech does not have a cost associated with it. In the context of beer "free beer" obviously means free of charge, everybody knows that you aren't entitled to go to the manufacturer and get the recipe to make it. So the term "free software" could mean free of charge or free of restriction or both.
The Amazon Fire Phone is Android based but does not use Google services.
Yes but it's not Android, it is a different operating system derived from Android called Fire OS.
Even if you play it that way, you're still proving my point. If Google didn't figure you using those services into the price of the device, then they would charge the OEM for licensing the Android trademark, which means the manufacturer would charge you more money for the phone.
They do, it's called the Open Handset Alliance.
The question was "What platform for independent development can easily be connected to a TV?".
Lots, including the PC. Now obviously the next question is why would you want to connect it to a TV, the answer would be that there are games (like local multiplayer ones with controller support) that people want to play that benefit from it.
I'm pretty sure that has been tried (by others) and did not hold up in court.
I don't see any reason it couldn't - if you have examples though that your assertion is based on I'd be interested to see because I can't find anything - you can specify license constraints on linkage so certainly there is nothing to stop restrictions being placed on the license of the input to GCC.
If he could, believe me, Stallman would.
I don't think he would, that would kill GCC.
How do you propose they prevent GCC from producing propriety software?
Make it a term of the license for the software.
I'm sure there's plenty of case law wherein a toolmaker has tried to claim that use of their tool gives them rights to the things created with that tool, and have been shut down.
Right, but this isn't about giving the GCC authors the rights to the programs created with GCC.
Yet OUYA fizzled for some reason.
Ouya fizzled because it was the answer to a question nobody asked. There are many platforms for independent development that already exist so yet another entry into the lowend was really not going to be successful. Being based on Android was in some ways advantageous but really that was the nail in its coffin, it was easy for developers to just develop an Android game and publish it independently, publish it to Google Play and publish it on the OUYA store so OUYA had no exclusivity, no reason to buy it. It was just a low-powered Android box tethered to your TV that had no "killer feature".
But Stallman's playing the long game. The cost is too high. Candy today, chains tomorrow.
So why not prevent GCC from being used to produce proprietary software? It seems pretty hypocritical to prevent the export of GCC's abstract source tree due to the fact that it could be used to aid closed-source software when GCC itself is used to produce closed-source software all the time.
Actually no. The disruptive aspect was supposed to be price and pace of development.
I suppose that's a fair assessment, ultimately price didn't matter since OEM licenses for Windows were so cheap that people wouldn't even notice the cost built in to the PC and while there has always been a lot of development going on it hasn't been particularly unified so there is a lot of duplicated effort in order to do a bunch of things in slightly different ways.
I'm guessing what he is referring to is the ongoing debate developers are having with Stallman over accessibility to GCC's abstract syntax tree. Many developers want this in order to be able to do auto-complete, refactoring and other IDE options within programs like EMACS but Stallman is concerned that this could lead to that abstract source tree (AST) being used as input to proprietary compiler backends, which he sees as bad.
This is another page in the book of hamstringing GCC and EMACS users in the name of freedom, or rather of trying to prevent a perceived threat from closed-source programs. We have already seen the long debates about plugins for GCC which ultimately ended with it being doable so long as it exports the symbol plugin_is_GPL_compatible and as David Engster already said, a GPL plugin for GCC could already be written to extract the AST if that's what compiler backend authors wanted to do.
Except on tablets, where it's still illegal.
Does it really matter? I mean Free Software doesn't want proprietary developers standing on their shoulders so they have the GPL to force their position, proprietary product developers don't want Free Software leveraging all the work they have done creating their hardware platform so they lock it down.
If we want Free Software on these kinds of products then the Free Software movement is going to have to address the fact that there is no platform on which to run. Proprietary product companies went out and developed or licensed their own platforms so the Free Software movement needs to do the same.
The dedication to pushing a free desktop is admirable, but it takes a disruptive product to effect real change in an established market. The disruptive aspect of it was supposed to be "freedom" but that wasn't enough. As you highlighted, the new smartphone and tablet categories still don't have entrants from the free software community so in that area it's another case of trying to play catch-up with the only ace up your sleeve being the freedom card.
With these new 'device' categories it is even harder because nobody sells a 'blank' device - a generic platform like the PC on to which you can load any operating system - nor can you easily turn most existing ones into that. Unless an OEM comes along happy to set a platform specification and sell blank platforms (like Raspberry Pi but obviously more easily integratable into small form factors) I don't see much progress here. The only way is to leverage the proprietary vendor platforms and hijack those with some innovative and disruptive alternative.
Their open-source contributions have always seemed to me to be letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law.
Their open source contributions seem to be in the spirit of open source rather than the letter-of-the-law, as you say they aren't legally required to release their contributions but they do anyway. Sure they aren't releasing the source to everything that the code is linked with like restrictive free software licensing enforces but that's the great thing about permissive open source, it allows free and proprietary authors to work together and leaves the choice of what contributions to make up to the author and not restrict other authors. Whereas restrictive open source licensing is a "my way or the highway" approach.
You can't build Mac apps on Darwin alone, which is why it makes sense to say that "Darwin is open source" but OS X is not.
I would certainly agree with that. I was only disputing that the parts of BSD that Apple did fork have become proprietary - because they haven't - they have formed the open source basis upon which Apple's proprietary frameworks are built.
which was based on MACH, which was derived from BSD
Mach was developed as a replacement kernel for the existing kernel in BSD operating systems. But that's neither here nor there, of course it has many BSD components but the idea that it was "proprietary forking" is nonsense, the parts derived from BSD and Mach exist in Darwin which is open source.
A kernel is not an operating system.
Obviously. Apple also didn't take "BSD and used it as their operating system", they did however use parts of the BSD kernel in their open source XNU kernel. There may also be BSD parts used in their open source operating system called Darwin. But there was no "proprietary forking", you can freely get and use the source code.
What he means is that they in fact used some parts of the FreeBSD kernel combined with the Mach kernel to create the open source XNU kernel that is used in their operating systems.
but there's also no end to the small one-person projects that can be done, and people can and do make a living like that, here in 2015.
Yet even some of the most popular projects that are used by both FOSS and proprietary products and companies are woefully under-resourced (OpenSSL) and underfunded (GPG).