Lets be fair here. Linux failed on the desktop OTOH Linux has huge market share in many other areas and its ability to run on low end hardware helped in penetrate the departmental level server market.
Well then... not sure what to say. It seems I was a bit late in my memory when I checked the facts but there were serious bios problems in those days. Might have been a pirated BIOS or a BIOS that was reused from another computer or a better clone or the dates for Pheonix I'm seeing may be wrong...
Compaq was the first to have a bios. I actually didn't realize the date, but now looking it up 1982 was when Compaq successfully cloned the bios. Pheonix came out in 1988 so that's the date just about anyone could get a BIOS. I think Pheonix is the fair date for when there were clones aplenty.
Actually the grey box market was mainly in the early 1990s. The 1980s clones were much rarer, Compaq was just winning their lawsuits to allow an imitation of the IBM bios.
Absolutely. But 15 years of it getting worse has gotten the situation to the point the president now brings up patent reform regularly in his speeches.
So far Apple has been a force for breaking up uniformity which is the primary mechanism for Microsoft's evil. Apple has themselves not created that many new evils, though their policies on iOS are reaching that level.
They have also been the gateway for new technologies into the mainstream.
Its too late to break them up. The sort of uniform control they had 12-18 years ago just doesn't exist anymore. They are big but they don't control things like they used to.
Of course they do. Lots of small firms have sued giants and won. It happens all the time in public interest. A huge war chest a legions of lawyers are very helpful. They aren't decisive.
Linux is a social movement. Legal entities have to sue. As far as Microsoft, Microsoft doesn't distribute GPLv3 code and it is questionable if they even distribute GPLv2 code for stuff that they claim is infringing. If they have that would be a defense for Casio.
Linux is not a corporation and social movements can't own property, in particular patent portfolios. What social movements can do however is make using patent portfolios very politically costly. What the open source community has proven quite effective at is making lawsuits a matter of public interest, rather than a private disagreement. The companies with large patent portfolios in general are not interested in being on the wrong side of public interest questions, they need government support in too many different areas (for example Microsoft needs extensive international copyright enforcement support).
The concern for Linux is not another major OS player but someone like Microsoft selling to a patent troll. Here though the patent is going to be subjected to a fully public examination. Just as in the SCO case, where people with direct knowledge came forward and self deposed to disprove SCO's claim; you may very well see people for all over come out of the woodwork and prove prior art or falsify claims in the patent filling.
Once you have credible people who will swear under oath that things in the original patent filling are false, patent trolling gets much more complex.
1) Arbitrary jumps. Which in practice are like function calls with no return mechanism. And you are right that stack based has replaced this. A pure plus for everyone.
2) Violations of one entrance / one exit. Things like "last" statement in loops or "if x then return" etc... inside loops. These are still used
3) Complex flow. Things like event driven programming make complex flow more common than it ever way in the goto hayday. I'm not sure there is a choice but...
Many of these algorithms were at the time being explained for the first time. The Knuth version of the algorithm is extremely important for people writing libraries and still quite influential. As far as MIX and verbose, any assembler is going to be verbose.
Actually compilation may impact copyright. You need to be licensed for various media. So for example if you have a music license for casette that doesn't permit CD redistribution. The courts do not look upon purely mechanical processes as not creating a new derived work.
Compilers on the other hand almost always explicitly state they aren't invoking those rights. GCC makes sure all libraries that are distributed standard (i.e. dynamic) are LGPL. But... there are GPLed 3rd party libraries and they would create GPLed code
That license is less bad than the QT Free license (mid 90's). Which basically said you had to give your application away, or make source available or you needed to use the commercial QT. As an aside, this was the whole problem with KDE. While KDE (GPL) qualified under the QT license just fine. QT didn't qualify under the GPL. Thus the opinion of Debian legal was that no one but the KDE foundation could legally distribute KDE since a licensee (but not the copyright holder) cannot join GPL code to non GPL comparable code.
So yes I think my analogy holds on the old QT license and up until fairly recently using a GPL library would toss your cose into GPL land. I agree the GCC analogy doesn't hold as well.
As far as the AGPL in general... I could see that going either way. The use of AGPL frameworks could require lots of websoftware to be released under the AGPL which starts to create a community of freely available code that anyone can use that's quite good but all encumbered by the AGPL. The same thing that happened in many areas like programming languages themselves. 20 years ago most compilers were commercial and most libraries were fully commercial.
On the other hand I do see your point about Opa and the AGPL. This is the reason the LGPL was created for languages since the GPL linking was considered too restrictive.
The TeaParty was acting irresponsibly. The Obama administration wanted to make sure they suffered politically for it and did create some panic.
On the other hand the Obama administration to some extent made it clear that default was off the table. The TeaParty OTOH did not indicate that cutting off social security or destroying America's Health Care system was their preferred alternative. They wanted to make sure Obama took the blame. To use your FIRE analogy, why was the theater crowded in the first place?
why SHOULD we have a AAA rating when we cannot spend within our means?
Because the United States up until recently had a strong commitment to never going into sovereign default and would have considered many other drastic actions before default. For example Federal assert sales, raising taxes, printing, austerity, massive defense cuts... have all been done in US history before default.
Because the credit company didn't buy our tissue-paper explanation "the check's in the mail!" and is still going to ding us.
Actually it wasn't about ability to pay it was about willingness to pay.
You mean raise import costs above the 10% inflation itself. That's an economic change. In terms of raising import costs in real terms, that would drive down the demand for imports vs. domestic goods and services plus drive up exports. That is generate employment which is far and away our biggest problem.
Well actually the Fed tightened interest rates after having allowed a bubble to get out of hand. So the government did cause the stock market crash in 1929. But I agree that wouldn't have caused the depression. The government held interest rates much too high for too long.
In terms of our current situation, its a failure to allow for easy bankruptcy and to not allow people administrating loans to renegotiate those loans. But the main problem has been extremely tight fiscal policy at the states and local government levels.
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Lets be fair here. Linux failed on the desktop OTOH Linux has huge market share in many other areas and its ability to run on low end hardware helped in penetrate the departmental level server market.
That's only possible because Dell buys these things cheap. Old PCs get tossed in the garbage. They really are worth that little.
Well then... not sure what to say. It seems I was a bit late in my memory when I checked the facts but there were serious bios problems in those days. Might have been a pirated BIOS or a BIOS that was reused from another computer or a better clone or the dates for Pheonix I'm seeing may be wrong...
Probably wasn't fully compatible. You remember the old "Microsoft flight simulator" test?
Compaq was the first to have a bios. I actually didn't realize the date, but now looking it up 1982 was when Compaq successfully cloned the bios. Pheonix came out in 1988 so that's the date just about anyone could get a BIOS. I think Pheonix is the fair date for when there were clones aplenty.
Actually the grey box market was mainly in the early 1990s. The 1980s clones were much rarer, Compaq was just winning their lawsuits to allow an imitation of the IBM bios.
Absolutely. But 15 years of it getting worse has gotten the situation to the point the president now brings up patent reform regularly in his speeches.
So far Apple has been a force for breaking up uniformity which is the primary mechanism for Microsoft's evil. Apple has themselves not created that many new evils, though their policies on iOS are reaching that level.
They have also been the gateway for new technologies into the mainstream.
Its too late to break them up. The sort of uniform control they had 12-18 years ago just doesn't exist anymore. They are big but they don't control things like they used to.
Yes. They also strengthen the level of frustration with America's patent system which might lead to meaningful reform.
Of course they do. Lots of small firms have sued giants and won. It happens all the time in public interest. A huge war chest a legions of lawyers are very helpful. They aren't decisive.
Microsoft has to prove intent. If Casio were to make a big deal out of demanding information and Microsoft were to refuse that would be a defense.
These are the sorts of things that need to get settled at trial.
Linux is a social movement. Legal entities have to sue. As far as Microsoft, Microsoft doesn't distribute GPLv3 code and it is questionable if they even distribute GPLv2 code for stuff that they claim is infringing. If they have that would be a defense for Casio.
Linux is not a corporation and social movements can't own property, in particular patent portfolios. What social movements can do however is make using patent portfolios very politically costly. What the open source community has proven quite effective at is making lawsuits a matter of public interest, rather than a private disagreement. The companies with large patent portfolios in general are not interested in being on the wrong side of public interest questions, they need government support in too many different areas (for example Microsoft needs extensive international copyright enforcement support).
The concern for Linux is not another major OS player but someone like Microsoft selling to a patent troll. Here though the patent is going to be subjected to a fully public examination. Just as in the SCO case, where people with direct knowledge came forward and self deposed to disprove SCO's claim; you may very well see people for all over come out of the woodwork and prove prior art or falsify claims in the patent filling.
Once you have credible people who will swear under oath that things in the original patent filling are false, patent trolling gets much more complex.
Sort of. There are 3 levels of anti-gotoism
1) Arbitrary jumps. Which in practice are like function calls with no return mechanism. And you are right that stack based has replaced this. A pure plus for everyone.
2) Violations of one entrance / one exit. Things like "last" statement in loops or "if x then return" etc... inside loops. These are still used
3) Complex flow. Things like event driven programming make complex flow more common than it ever way in the goto hayday. I'm not sure there is a choice but...
Many of these algorithms were at the time being explained for the first time. The Knuth version of the algorithm is extremely important for people writing libraries and still quite influential. As far as MIX and verbose, any assembler is going to be verbose.
Reread the thread. The discussion is not what QT uses now but what it used in the mid 90s.
Actually compilation may impact copyright. You need to be licensed for various media. So for example if you have a music license for casette that doesn't permit CD redistribution. The courts do not look upon purely mechanical processes as not creating a new derived work.
Compilers on the other hand almost always explicitly state they aren't invoking those rights. GCC makes sure all libraries that are distributed standard (i.e. dynamic) are LGPL. But... there are GPLed 3rd party libraries and they would create GPLed code
OK I just read the link.
That license is less bad than the QT Free license (mid 90's). Which basically said you had to give your application away, or make source available or you needed to use the commercial QT. As an aside, this was the whole problem with KDE. While KDE (GPL) qualified under the QT license just fine. QT didn't qualify under the GPL. Thus the opinion of Debian legal was that no one but the KDE foundation could legally distribute KDE since a licensee (but not the copyright holder) cannot join GPL code to non GPL comparable code.
So yes I think my analogy holds on the old QT license and up until fairly recently using a GPL library would toss your cose into GPL land. I agree the GCC analogy doesn't hold as well.
As far as the AGPL in general... I could see that going either way. The use of AGPL frameworks could require lots of websoftware to be released under the AGPL which starts to create a community of freely available code that anyone can use that's quite good but all encumbered by the AGPL. The same thing that happened in many areas like programming languages themselves. 20 years ago most compilers were commercial and most libraries were fully commercial.
On the other hand I do see your point about Opa and the AGPL. This is the reason the LGPL was created for languages since the GPL linking was considered too restrictive.
Seems to me QT and GCC were both successful with that sort of licensing.
a) Only one side was doing brinkmanship. The other was just raising the alarm.
b) One side initiated.
The TeaParty was acting irresponsibly.
The Obama administration wanted to make sure they suffered politically for it and did create some panic.
On the other hand the Obama administration to some extent made it clear that default was off the table. The TeaParty OTOH did not indicate that cutting off social security or destroying America's Health Care system was their preferred alternative. They wanted to make sure Obama took the blame. To use your FIRE analogy, why was the theater crowded in the first place?
Because the United States up until recently had a strong commitment to never going into sovereign default and would have considered many other drastic actions before default. For example Federal assert sales, raising taxes, printing, austerity, massive defense cuts... have all been done in US history before default.
Actually it wasn't about ability to pay it was about willingness to pay.
You mean raise import costs above the 10% inflation itself. That's an economic change. In terms of raising import costs in real terms, that would drive down the demand for imports vs. domestic goods and services plus drive up exports. That is generate employment which is far and away our biggest problem.
Well actually the Fed tightened interest rates after having allowed a bubble to get out of hand. So the government did cause the stock market crash in 1929. But I agree that wouldn't have caused the depression. The government held interest rates much too high for too long.
In terms of our current situation, its a failure to allow for easy bankruptcy and to not allow people administrating loans to renegotiate those loans. But the main problem has been extremely tight fiscal policy at the states and local government levels.