They certainly committed a huge PR blunder, and responded to the situation very badly for some time. As has every huge company that's been around for a few decades at some point in their past. To not do business with them again is certainly your prerogative, but seems awfully short-sighted. My guess is that, at this point, Sony is the LEAST likely company to ever try something like a rootkit again after their previous public flogging.
Are you sure? My interpretation is that once something is under GPL, it is there forever. We have CUPS. Apple may now have ANOTHER COPY of CUPS that looks the same, but under a different license.
You received CUPS under the GPLv2 license. Apple receives CUPS under a proprietary license. It's the same thing, just the licensing terms agreed to are different. It's just like how MySQL is available via the GPL and available via other licenses as well. Except that Apple now owns the copyrights to CUPS and isn't licensing it to others under a non-GPL license, just to themselves. The project isn't forked.
Anyway, you can go fork CUPS yourself if you want and GPLv3 it, but then it will be more difficult for the primary developer (Apple) and you to collaborate on any changes.
My guess is that Apple has been doing the vast majority of the work on CUPS anyway for the past few months, so they aren't really concerned about a fork. Just like konquerer, the open source community can do what it needs to do and Apple will work with them and contribute to them, but they have to make sure their own interests are covered first. It seems to make a lot of sense, and everyone gets what they need from it.
The problem is not to eliminate trivial patents as all software patents are trivial.
As the core of your argument, this is a statement that you need to back up in order for your assertion to be meaningful. I've seen some extremely innovative software inventions. To me, there is no practical difference between "building" something in a software world and building it in real life, and making an artificial distinction between these two types of inventions will hobble the industry down the line.
Quite simply, the bar for "obviousness" has been set far too low, and needs to be raised. Little other practical change is necessary for the patent system to work pretty well for software, IMHO.
DirectX won't help you for many of the top selling consoles right now (PS2, PS3, Wii, and all handhelds). And there are even a growing number of MacOS X and Linux development houses. It's true knowing DirectX is valuable, but knowing ONLY DirectX is awfully limiting.
I disagree, requiring the entire JMF just to play media files would be like requiring the entire JAI just to display an image in your app. I would rather they provide a small package for media playback, and then the full JMF for advanced playback and editing. That is what the Media Components are supposed to be.
So componentize JMF and let it load in segments. Starting over from scratch with an incompatible API makes no sense. You'll eventually want to make it flexible enough that it'll become JMF again anyway. Just re-doing JMF right would offer the best transition plan for those who have already managed to get multimedia into their Java application, and create a transition path for those who tinker with it to eventually move to something more substantial.
It isn't the LGPLv3 code that is the problem, it's the "GPLv2 only". Thus the advice to relicense to "GPLv2 or later".
It takes two to have a problem. "GPLv2 or later" is essentially handing all your rights over to FSF. I don't sign blank checks, I don't sign contracts before they're written, and I'd be a fool to write "GPLv2 or later" on any piece of code I wrote.
Having also been driven to near insanity by JMF I understand your position, but I say just fix JMF instead of creating a new media API that will get dumped and neglected. Most of the problems with JMF are implementation issues, not core to the system. I have great hope for FMJ, but having Sun's support there would sure help.
My greatest new feature, which would easily trump all others, would be heavyweight-lightweight mixing. Right now lightweight Swing can't even render a modern web page, play back any media, provide a decent text editing component, or embed ActiveX or other external frames. All of these things I would consider basic requirements to developing a desktop application on Windows. Being able to mix heavyweight and lightweight would allow one to use a host of technologies in a Swing application that would actually make Java into a fully capable desktop development environment. The rest are just icing.
If 10 years ago someone told me the biggest company on the internet would be an advertising agency that used the phrase "do no evil" and people believed them I would have said they were on crack. Alas, it seems to be the case.
This brings up a funny question in my mind. Basically, there are very few fundamental sources of energy for us to use: solar (photovoltaics, oil, gas, ethanol, etc) and nuclear (fission, fusion). But the rotational energy of the solar system and our planet in particular seem more difficult to tap. Some of it might be partially represented by geothermal power, but you can't exactly tie gears to the planets and attach them to a generator. But your comment makes me wonder if the magnetic field of the natural magnets in Earth's crust may or may not form a kind of energy storage device for past rotational kinetic energy that formed the Earth's dynamo and created the magnets in the first place.
(Sorry, guys. Bill Gates can code, and manage coding projects. Maybe he hasn't written a single line for Microsoft for a couple of decades, but neither has Woz for Apple, and their understanding of contemporary technology was fundamental to the startup of their respective firms.)
Sorry, but no. Your analogy is flawed-- Gates is Jobs, not Woz. He's not really credited with directly contributing much, if anything, to the field of software or hardware. His contribution to the world of technology is, for better or worse, in Microsoft's cut-throat business practices. Gates' connections and money he got through his parents got Microsoft off the ground (it's a little easier to become a billionaire when you start out as a millionaire), and his willingness to screw the next guy quicker than anyone else made it grow and succeed.
I'm actually not all that much of a fan of Woz, or at least his public image (I've never met him). He seems like an annoying egotistical kid to me. But let's not go trying to pretend that Bill Gates could ever have taken his place.
Except that's probably not even true. Apple has done extensive work making their own C/C++/ObjC front-end for LLVM that doesn't use GCC. Since the iPhone is ARM-based, I would put even money on it being one of the LLVM-built releases.
I agree... it's interesting that they've got an "anti-trust" investigation going on concerning one of the biggest competitive situations in media formats ever. It doesn't get much less monopolistic than this.
I don't think anyone's arguing they are out of compliance with their license. The question is whether 1-2 days is a reasonable timeframe to correct a legal matter. These guys don't appear to be doing anything except being a little slow to respond to legal inquiries-- they are showing every intention of complying and show a basic understanding of what they have to do. Just give them a little time.
Why, can the Neuros (the subject of this article) do that? It sure doesn't look like it.
I think it's pretty disingenuous of Neuros to claim that running custom software is 'hacking' the PS3 'against the wishes' of Sony when Sony provides a linux distro and switching to it is in the built-in menus.
AMD has been shipping 65nm CPUs of one kind or another for about 6 months now. However, the Athlon X2 line still has many 90nm parts in its lineup-- they're still in the process of moving to a 65nm process, as the comment notes. So "totally wrong" is probably less correct than the original statement.
The thing is, both Blade Runner and Contact are a pale shadow of their books. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", on which Bladerunner is theoretically based, contains many times the depth and probably only takes you the same couple hours to read. In Contact, the entire point of the book was more or less missed by the movie-- in the book, the dichotomy between faith and science is addressed by the ending. The movie makes it into a gimmicky twist.
I agree that Blade Runner is one of the best science fiction movies of all time. And it stands up amazingly well to modern special effects and scenery. But the movie is still a movie-- entertainment with tunnel-vision, spoon-fed philosophy.
It not about Safari, IE, and Firefox, it's about KHTML, IE, and Gecko. And 2 of 3 of these engines are open source. The article makes it sound like Apple has some proprietary, closed-source browser, when almost all of it is open source.
And the latest statistics I've seen show Safari at around 1/4 to 1/3 the market share of Firefox. While that's certainly not ideal for Apple, it's not like Safari is insignificant. And while Safari probably constitutes most of the KHTML-based hits on most sites, Konquerer, Nokia's cellphone, and others probably feed some degree of KHTML share as well.
The bottom line is that this article isn't really based on facts, it's just one open source developer ranting about another one.
I highly doubt that logic will hold up in court. In fact, the "or later" clause of the GPL itself has never been tested in court. In addition, I would be surprised if a huge number of free software projects don't fork over the GPLv2/v3 debacle, meaning you'll have two potentially incompatible versions of every library you use.
Incidentally, TiVo's use is NOT a "loophole". Back when GPLv2 was written, Stallman only seemed to care about how software was used. Now GPLv3 is trying to restrict people's use of HARDWARE as well. You can take TiVo's code, go build your own hardware, and use TiVo's code on it. But you can't use your own code on TiVo's hardware. I'm afraid I'm in the camp that thinks GPL has no business telling people what they can and can't do on their hardware.
The fact remains that from the time it was first publicly demoed in 1999 until its release was over 4 years (not two, as your quoted text suggests... 1999 to 2004). Even after Microsoft announced they were buying Bungie, they were promising a Mac port for years. I guess it's not true that Microsoft's buyout was a result of Halo delays, but your timeline seems further off than mine, despite it being a "wikipedia" quote.
Actually, I was thinking the opposite. We have the "data" in the form of genes that encode proteins... the "junk" part may be the compiled code.
And sorting out the DNA code will be daunting. Imagine a software project that hasn't been rewritten in a billion years and uses every hack available to accomplish its goals.
Bungie was a Mac-first game development house, and Halo was going to be released on the Mac first and Windows second. Then the next year at MacWorld, it still hadn't been released. When it still wasn't released the year after that, Microsoft stepped in, bought Bungie, and put the Mac port on indefinite hold. They released it on XBox, then Windows, then over a year later, for the Mac. What could have been a premiere game for the Mac instead helped establish the XBox as a viable competitor against the Playstation.
Apple had originally been working on merging GCC and LLVM. I'm not at the WWDC this week, but from what I've heard they have decided to do away with the GCC bit and write their own front-end called "clang". Slides are available in the "Using LLVM" section of this presentation. They also further discuss their OpenGL shading language front-end for LLVM.
Slashdot Mirror
They certainly committed a huge PR blunder, and responded to the situation very badly for some time. As has every huge company that's been around for a few decades at some point in their past. To not do business with them again is certainly your prerogative, but seems awfully short-sighted. My guess is that, at this point, Sony is the LEAST likely company to ever try something like a rootkit again after their previous public flogging.
Are you sure? My interpretation is that once something is under GPL, it is there forever. We have CUPS. Apple may now have ANOTHER COPY of CUPS that looks the same, but under a different license.
You received CUPS under the GPLv2 license. Apple receives CUPS under a proprietary license. It's the same thing, just the licensing terms agreed to are different. It's just like how MySQL is available via the GPL and available via other licenses as well. Except that Apple now owns the copyrights to CUPS and isn't licensing it to others under a non-GPL license, just to themselves. The project isn't forked.
Anyway, you can go fork CUPS yourself if you want and GPLv3 it, but then it will be more difficult for the primary developer (Apple) and you to collaborate on any changes.
My guess is that Apple has been doing the vast majority of the work on CUPS anyway for the past few months, so they aren't really concerned about a fork. Just like konquerer, the open source community can do what it needs to do and Apple will work with them and contribute to them, but they have to make sure their own interests are covered first. It seems to make a lot of sense, and everyone gets what they need from it.
The problem is not to eliminate trivial patents as all software patents are trivial.
As the core of your argument, this is a statement that you need to back up in order for your assertion to be meaningful. I've seen some extremely innovative software inventions. To me, there is no practical difference between "building" something in a software world and building it in real life, and making an artificial distinction between these two types of inventions will hobble the industry down the line.
Quite simply, the bar for "obviousness" has been set far too low, and needs to be raised. Little other practical change is necessary for the patent system to work pretty well for software, IMHO.
DirectX won't help you for many of the top selling consoles right now (PS2, PS3, Wii, and all handhelds). And there are even a growing number of MacOS X and Linux development houses. It's true knowing DirectX is valuable, but knowing ONLY DirectX is awfully limiting.
I disagree, requiring the entire JMF just to play media files would be like requiring the entire JAI just to display an image in your app. I would rather they provide a small package for media playback, and then the full JMF for advanced playback and editing. That is what the Media Components are supposed to be.
So componentize JMF and let it load in segments. Starting over from scratch with an incompatible API makes no sense. You'll eventually want to make it flexible enough that it'll become JMF again anyway. Just re-doing JMF right would offer the best transition plan for those who have already managed to get multimedia into their Java application, and create a transition path for those who tinker with it to eventually move to something more substantial.
It isn't the LGPLv3 code that is the problem, it's the "GPLv2 only". Thus the advice to relicense to "GPLv2 or later".
It takes two to have a problem. "GPLv2 or later" is essentially handing all your rights over to FSF. I don't sign blank checks, I don't sign contracts before they're written, and I'd be a fool to write "GPLv2 or later" on any piece of code I wrote.
Having also been driven to near insanity by JMF I understand your position, but I say just fix JMF instead of creating a new media API that will get dumped and neglected. Most of the problems with JMF are implementation issues, not core to the system. I have great hope for FMJ, but having Sun's support there would sure help.
My greatest new feature, which would easily trump all others, would be heavyweight-lightweight mixing. Right now lightweight Swing can't even render a modern web page, play back any media, provide a decent text editing component, or embed ActiveX or other external frames. All of these things I would consider basic requirements to developing a desktop application on Windows. Being able to mix heavyweight and lightweight would allow one to use a host of technologies in a Swing application that would actually make Java into a fully capable desktop development environment. The rest are just icing.
If 10 years ago someone told me the biggest company on the internet would be an advertising agency that used the phrase "do no evil" and people believed them I would have said they were on crack. Alas, it seems to be the case.
This brings up a funny question in my mind. Basically, there are very few fundamental sources of energy for us to use: solar (photovoltaics, oil, gas, ethanol, etc) and nuclear (fission, fusion). But the rotational energy of the solar system and our planet in particular seem more difficult to tap. Some of it might be partially represented by geothermal power, but you can't exactly tie gears to the planets and attach them to a generator. But your comment makes me wonder if the magnetic field of the natural magnets in Earth's crust may or may not form a kind of energy storage device for past rotational kinetic energy that formed the Earth's dynamo and created the magnets in the first place.
we've turned a credible military mission to bring democracy to the middle east
Heh.
(Sorry, guys. Bill Gates can code, and manage coding projects. Maybe he hasn't written a single line for Microsoft for a couple of decades, but neither has Woz for Apple, and their understanding of contemporary technology was fundamental to the startup of their respective firms.)
Sorry, but no. Your analogy is flawed-- Gates is Jobs, not Woz. He's not really credited with directly contributing much, if anything, to the field of software or hardware. His contribution to the world of technology is, for better or worse, in Microsoft's cut-throat business practices. Gates' connections and money he got through his parents got Microsoft off the ground (it's a little easier to become a billionaire when you start out as a millionaire), and his willingness to screw the next guy quicker than anyone else made it grow and succeed.
I'm actually not all that much of a fan of Woz, or at least his public image (I've never met him). He seems like an annoying egotistical kid to me. But let's not go trying to pretend that Bill Gates could ever have taken his place.
Except that's probably not even true. Apple has done extensive work making their own C/C++/ObjC front-end for LLVM that doesn't use GCC. Since the iPhone is ARM-based, I would put even money on it being one of the LLVM-built releases.
I agree... it's interesting that they've got an "anti-trust" investigation going on concerning one of the biggest competitive situations in media formats ever. It doesn't get much less monopolistic than this.
I don't think anyone's arguing they are out of compliance with their license. The question is whether 1-2 days is a reasonable timeframe to correct a legal matter. These guys don't appear to be doing anything except being a little slow to respond to legal inquiries-- they are showing every intention of complying and show a basic understanding of what they have to do. Just give them a little time.
Why, can the Neuros (the subject of this article) do that? It sure doesn't look like it.
I think it's pretty disingenuous of Neuros to claim that running custom software is 'hacking' the PS3 'against the wishes' of Sony when Sony provides a linux distro and switching to it is in the built-in menus.
AMD has been shipping 65nm CPUs of one kind or another for about 6 months now. However, the Athlon X2 line still has many 90nm parts in its lineup-- they're still in the process of moving to a 65nm process, as the comment notes. So "totally wrong" is probably less correct than the original statement.
The thing is, both Blade Runner and Contact are a pale shadow of their books. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", on which Bladerunner is theoretically based, contains many times the depth and probably only takes you the same couple hours to read. In Contact, the entire point of the book was more or less missed by the movie-- in the book, the dichotomy between faith and science is addressed by the ending. The movie makes it into a gimmicky twist.
I agree that Blade Runner is one of the best science fiction movies of all time. And it stands up amazingly well to modern special effects and scenery. But the movie is still a movie-- entertainment with tunnel-vision, spoon-fed philosophy.
It not about Safari, IE, and Firefox, it's about KHTML, IE, and Gecko. And 2 of 3 of these engines are open source. The article makes it sound like Apple has some proprietary, closed-source browser, when almost all of it is open source.
And the latest statistics I've seen show Safari at around 1/4 to 1/3 the market share of Firefox. While that's certainly not ideal for Apple, it's not like Safari is insignificant. And while Safari probably constitutes most of the KHTML-based hits on most sites, Konquerer, Nokia's cellphone, and others probably feed some degree of KHTML share as well.
The bottom line is that this article isn't really based on facts, it's just one open source developer ranting about another one.
Confirms the Standard Model.. again.
More like, "confirms that the Standard Model can be used to make predictions about the Standard Model."
Complete internal consistency is one nice aspect of any model, and something I don't think any of the Standard Model's alternatives have achieved.
I highly doubt that logic will hold up in court. In fact, the "or later" clause of the GPL itself has never been tested in court. In addition, I would be surprised if a huge number of free software projects don't fork over the GPLv2/v3 debacle, meaning you'll have two potentially incompatible versions of every library you use.
Incidentally, TiVo's use is NOT a "loophole". Back when GPLv2 was written, Stallman only seemed to care about how software was used. Now GPLv3 is trying to restrict people's use of HARDWARE as well. You can take TiVo's code, go build your own hardware, and use TiVo's code on it. But you can't use your own code on TiVo's hardware. I'm afraid I'm in the camp that thinks GPL has no business telling people what they can and can't do on their hardware.
The fact remains that from the time it was first publicly demoed in 1999 until its release was over 4 years (not two, as your quoted text suggests... 1999 to 2004). Even after Microsoft announced they were buying Bungie, they were promising a Mac port for years. I guess it's not true that Microsoft's buyout was a result of Halo delays, but your timeline seems further off than mine, despite it being a "wikipedia" quote.
Actually, I was thinking the opposite. We have the "data" in the form of genes that encode proteins... the "junk" part may be the compiled code.
And sorting out the DNA code will be daunting. Imagine a software project that hasn't been rewritten in a billion years and uses every hack available to accomplish its goals.
Bungie was a Mac-first game development house, and Halo was going to be released on the Mac first and Windows second. Then the next year at MacWorld, it still hadn't been released. When it still wasn't released the year after that, Microsoft stepped in, bought Bungie, and put the Mac port on indefinite hold. They released it on XBox, then Windows, then over a year later, for the Mac. What could have been a premiere game for the Mac instead helped establish the XBox as a viable competitor against the Playstation.
Apple had originally been working on merging GCC and LLVM. I'm not at the WWDC this week, but from what I've heard they have decided to do away with the GCC bit and write their own front-end called "clang". Slides are available in the "Using LLVM" section of this presentation. They also further discuss their OpenGL shading language front-end for LLVM.