when I see phrase by a Microsoft-like corporation such as "gives consumers the freedom to", my bullshit indicator shoots up
Why do you hate freedom? Don't you want the freedom to have a hot power-hungry general-purpose computer in your living room to let you be a more efficient consumer of power and entertainment and Windows licenses, instead of having to put up with a cheap cable box, DVD player or VCR, game console, or (horror of horrors) some kind of evening entertainment that doesn't involve television or movies at all? Isn't having your operating system and computer hardware hobbled by DRM a small price to pay for the freedom to use Windows for your critical evening viewing hours?
Managed Copy is a guaranteed feature within HD DVD that gives consumers the freedom to make copies of their discs to a hard drive or home server, including Media Center PCs using Intel Viiv technology... to a hard drive or home server running Microsoft operating systems using Microsoft's strong DRM and Intel's hardware DRM support, I suspect they mean...
This is the first time I've heard that the point of the screen on an iPod is primarily for looking at albums and cover art. Nobody ever told me that albums and cover art were what I was going to miss when I got my Shuffle. no, they were all going on about how I woudln't be able to create and select playlists and songs, rate music, see what the heck I'm playing, and all the basic stuff like that.
If the screen scratches people have observed are bad enough to make that impossible, I'd be much surprised. Still, it's worth a few pennies to keep the display pristine... and that's all it should take: you can get thin vinyl at just about any craft store, and if my experience with it on my Palm is any guide it'll stick fine just through contact, thanks to van-der-waals forces, hydrogen bonding, and cartoon physics. Well, maybe not the last, but it works...
It still does not explain how a corporation, MediaServices, Inc., can sell items that are under US copyright cheaper than a US company can sell the items.
Because a Russian corporation operates under Russian copyright law, and a US corporation operates under US copyright law.
Is this a good example of how the RIAA's pricing scheme is unbalanced?
It's a good example of the difference between the Russian economy and law and the US ecconomy and law.
If you want to rent music, fair enough, but now you're comparing renting to buying and the whole point you were making about the songs being about $0.80 instead of about $1.00 is moot.
We're talking the entire installed base of PCs, Macs, handhelds etc...
No, we're not.
We're talking about Symantec pushing AV software on people who don't need AV software. We're talking about how much damage AV software for platforms that can't usefully use AV software does, compared to the damage from viruses on these platforms.
If you have a PC running Windows, you need AV software.
If you have anything else, you're better off without it.
Symantec's whole point in these scare tactics is to try and convince people to spend money on software that can't do anything but mess them up.
At $200 for the Pocket DJ, and $0.20 cents saved per song, after buying 1000 songs for $800 you'll have saved enough money to justify buying a second music player.
but could you back that statement up with any sort of actual data?
Number of actual viruses in the wild for PalmOS: 0
Number of actual viruses in the wild for Pocket PC: 0
Number of actual viruses in the wild for Mac OS X: 0
Number of people who have lost data due to actual viruses on palmOS, Pocket PC, and Mac OS X: 0
Number of people who have lost data due to malfunctioning antivirus software on PalmOS, Pocket PC, and Mac OS X: more than zero.
There have been cases where AV software has locked up and caused a hard reset on PalmOS or Pocket PC, or caused legitimate mail to be dropped or bounced, and where a false positive from the AV software resulted in an IT department unnecessarily wiping a handheld or computer.
No matter how small a number these represent, any positive integer is greather than zero.
Because iTunes isn't operating out of the ex-Soviet-Union.
Is it legal to download music from site AllOFMP3.com?
All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3-05-03 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting.
Users are responsible for any usage and distribution of all materials received from AllOFMP3.com. This responsibility depends on the local legislation of each user's country of residence. AllOFMP3.com's Administration does not keep up with the laws of different countries and is not responsible the actions of non-Russian users.
Symantec makes their money by producing an amazingly complex set of tools for patching up a security failure after the fact. It's in tehir interest to convince as many people on as many systems as possible that this is the best way to deal with security problems.
They have been pulling this kind of thing for years, predicting floods of malware on Palms, Pocket PCs, mobile phones, and I'm sure that game consoles and internet connected coffee machines will be next.
I'm glad they're working on the problem, so if it ever happens that Apple pulls a stupid trick like ActiveX they'll be there, but in the meantime more people have lost data due to false positives from antivirus software on these platforms than have lost data to actual viruses... so I'll steer clear and take everything they say about it with a grain of salt.
If the "user intervention" involves "clicking YES, rape my computer now" on a dialog box, then this is a real problem. Because people are being systematically trained by legitimate websites, including Microsoft's Windows Update to click "YES" in response to routine security dialogs.
Popping up a dialog bex before doing something potentially stupid is not a lot better than going ahead and doing something stupid. DON'T IMPLEMENT THE DANGEROUS CAPABILITY IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The only fix for the problems with "Security Zones" is to get rid of "Security Zones" and have separate applications for trusted and untrusted sources... with no mechanism in the untrusted applications (Internet Explorer) to use the capabilities of the trusted one (Windows Explorer, Software Update, etc).
IBM is expending huge sums of money on open source applications like Linux, Apache, gcc, etc. that people acutally USE and that IBM doesn't own and never owned.
Apple doesn't have IBM-level budgets.
GNUstep is a perfect example. There is absolutely no reference to it I can find on Apple.com.
You can't find a reference to it on most Linux sites either. The Linux community has largely ignored it, and you're expecting Apple to give it any kind of attention?
And the LAST thing Linux/Unix needs is yet another poorly-implemented desktop graphical API.
That's why it needs GNUstep, because it's a well-designed and well-implemented one... as opposed to the KDE/Gnome "let's duplicate Windows" efforts.
NT is a kernel that can run multiple subsystems on top of it. Currently the only really viable subsystem is Win32, and a lot of that has been moved into the kernel, but the application-visible API under Win32 is basically the same one that ran on Windows 95. The improved shell and everything else they were developing for Windows NT were all thrown away, and the Windows 95 shell was kept.
The result is that while there's the potential of implementing good local security... and that POTNETNIAL is what you're talking about... in practice if you're running REAL applications you have to provide users access to way toomuch stuff just so they can get their work done... even now.
And THAT is the problem. Windows was designed for a single-user environment, and they don't dare fix it.
Darwin is basically a feeble gesture and Apple clearly has no real commitment to the open source community unlike, say, IBM.
When IBM open-sources Lotus Notes, come back and talk to me about IBM's commitment to open source.
IBM is so much bigger than Apple that if Apple were to show that kind of "real commitment" to open source they wouldn't have any resources to do anything but.
Open source people see developing for Darwin as a waste of time
Where did I say anything about developing for Darwin? Darwin's the boring bit, you're much better off with FreeBSD or even Linux for that part of the system. I'm talking about the piles of other stuff they're releasing that Linux Bigots don't even know about because they go (as I already noted) "Ick, Mach" and assume that Darwin's all there is. You're doing it right now... it didn't even occur to you to even see what was on the table... the Apple logo scared you off.
Screw that. Take GNUstep and the other stuff on Apple's repository and make something good out of that. If it benefits Apple, it'll benefit Apple no more than anyone else.
Then why can't I play songs purchased from iTunes on my Creative player?
Turn their old "RIP MIX BURN" ad campaign on its head.
MIX the songs into a playlist about 70 minutes long.
BURN them to CD.
RIP them to MP3.
In some cases there MAY be a detectable loss of quality from the re-encoding, but if you cared about quality you'd have bought the original CD instead of the lossy-compressed online versions anyway.
People forget that Apple sued Microsoft to keep non Apple GUIS off the market.
They sued because Microsoft had made an agreement with them about what they were going to do with Windows. Then Microsoft decided the agreement meant one thing, Apple decided it meant another, and the judge sided with Microsoft.
It was Xerox who sued over whether anyone else could have a GUI. Because, after all, they did invent it. The judge said 'you idiots, you waited too long' and that was the end of it.
Nope. You're wrong. I have a computer here in my collection. It has Microsoft (pre-SCO) Xenix installed on it.
Thats nice.
I ran a network of almost 50 multi-user Xenix systems hooked together with OpenNET, supporting 500 users, sharing the network with and talking to VAXes running DECNET and VMSNET and DOS PCs running Microsoft Lan Manager. That's Microsoft Xenix, Copyright 1982-1984, networked together over Ethernet running multiple network protocols. It had a better networked file system than NFS that gave us remote access to devices and named pipes. I could sit on a VMS box and talk to a process on a Xenix box over a named pipe on Xenix. I could sit on one Xenix box and open//xds13/dev/ttyd3 to debug a printer. I could even open raw disk devices over the net for remote dumps.
And Microsoft threw all that away and went back to a single-user operating system with NO security at all... and even with all the potential of the NT kernel in hand they have YET to be implement enough local security to keep users from becoming "root" without locking them down into a 'kiosk' mode, and NOW they have the gall to say that nobody could have done better.
EVERYONE did a better job of computer security than Microsoft did in Windows.
You are certainly looking at history through rose-colored glasses.
History? This is my life.
Old Unix ran RSH by default.
RSH is not part of the design of UNIX. NFS is not part of the design of UNIX... it's not even a fully compatible UNIX file system. These tools, and sendmail, are all applications running under UNIX. There was also OpenNET, FutureNet, the System V suite, the Xenix suite (which Bill Gates certainly knows about), and on and on. All of these are built on top of an operating system that's has from the very start had to work in hostile environments... when you have CS students and professors sharing the same systems, with tests and grades and homework assignments all on the same computer, you need solid multi-user security.
Sendmail? There was one incident involving sendmail's inherently insecure back door, and it was closed.
Let's compare that with Microsoft's track record on Internet Explorer... they integrated IE and the desktop in 1997, this led immediately to a rash of email worms. Instead of backing out the design flaw, instead of doing the equivalent of replacing the rsh suite with ssh, Microsoft applied patch after patch and even went to the mat with the DoJ to keep this fundamentally broken and unfixable design... one that's still being exploited even after XP SP2... in place.
As for local security... it's still not practical to run Windows with a reasonably tight set of local permissions, the kind of environment that was routine for UNIX back in 1980. Would you give students an account and login access to their professor's workstation, running Windows, today? You could get away with that on an only mildly tight UNIX environment, but in Windows?
As for NT... NT itself is a very nice design, with a lot of useful features that have the potential of providing a very secure environment indeed. But NT isn't Microsoft's flagship product. Windows is, and Windows, in practice, is still suffering from being that old single-user wide-open every-application-owns-the-computer system. Yes, you have encrypted passwords on teh wire. But they're encrypted 7 characters at a time from a tiny character set using an insecure algorithm... they might as well have not bothered at all. And their local security... it's a joke, it effectively doesn't exist on anything but a 'kiosk'.
THAT is where Microsoft's problems live. And THAT is the big lie, because the basic security of Windows is far far worse than even Microsoft's old Xenix. And BECAUSE Microsoft sold Xenix (which didn't have rsh, nor sendmail, nor nfs) gates HAS to know that he's lying. Either that or he's astoundingly incompetant - and you don't get to be the richest man in the world by being incompetant.
Frankly, the fact that it took some effort from the community to correct a situation that shouldn't have happend in the first place is evidence that Apple is not really on the up and up.
There was no "situation".
There was nothing to correct. Apple didn't "have to" do anything.
The only "situation" was that some people misinterpreted one of Apple's code releases as being much much more relevant to KHTML than it was and people started bugging the KDE folks about how long it was going to be before they could "integrate Apple's patches".
The thing that was missed is that while Webcore is based on KHTML, but it's not KHTML, and it's never going to merge with KHTML... any more than Darwin and FreeBSD are going to merge: Webcore runs under a completely different graphics system, and while they started out by providing hooks to emulate the KDE environment they quickly moved far beyond that.
Opening up the repository was not necessary, it's not required by anyone, it's something Apple did on their own initiative. Spinning it as something that "took some effort from the community" and was needed to "correct a situation" indicates either profound ignorance of the actual facts, or malicious intent.
Gates: Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not.
The level of balls it takes to tell this big a lie when you know better (and he does know better... Microsoft Xenix was multiuser and networked and was set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together) is astonishing.
His tongue should have burned to ashes in his mouth before it let him say such a thing. He should have been struck by lightning, the plague, and embarassing warts before he got to those lying words. With shingles and boils he should have been afflicted. How can there be any justice in the world when a man can make a claim like that and it passes unchallenged?
As to Apple contributing I give you khtml as an example of where the talk the talk but don't walk the walk.
You're kidding, right?
They didn't ask for any favors, they provided regular snapshots of their source tree, and when a bunch of people in the community got bent out of shape over what turned out to be a complete misunderstanding they went out of their way to accomodate everyone, including putting their source repository on the web.
Anyone who says they "don't walk the walk" has been viewing a filtered reality, in the real one they've gone far beyond what anyone could have expected of them.
Nobody was asking for them because, frankly, Apple's kernel is an obsolete 1980s academia design with poor performance.
And people like you in the Linux-centric part of the free software community are ignoring all the rest of the really nice stuff in the pile of software that Apple's distributing because you're going "Ick, Mach". Personally, I'd rather they didn't use Mach... the 1970's design in Linux and BSD is much easier to get right than a microkernel, and Mach isn't even much of a microkernel... but *damn*, there's some really good stuff in there outside the kernel.
Could take a free operating system and turn it into something people want to pirate. Long live the GPL.
The BSD license is less restrictive than the GPL specifically to allow this. Operating systems using BSD-licensed software include Solaris, HP/UX, Mac OS X, Tru64, AIX, SCO UNIX, Windows NT/2000/XP, and Windows Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
when I see phrase by a Microsoft-like corporation such as "gives consumers the freedom to", my bullshit indicator shoots up
Why do you hate freedom? Don't you want the freedom to have a hot power-hungry general-purpose computer in your living room to let you be a more efficient consumer of power and entertainment and Windows licenses, instead of having to put up with a cheap cable box, DVD player or VCR, game console, or (horror of horrors) some kind of evening entertainment that doesn't involve television or movies at all? Isn't having your operating system and computer hardware hobbled by DRM a small price to pay for the freedom to use Windows for your critical evening viewing hours?
Managed Copy is a guaranteed feature within HD DVD that gives consumers the freedom to make copies of their discs to a hard drive or home server, including Media Center PCs using Intel Viiv technology ... to a hard drive or home server running Microsoft operating systems using Microsoft's strong DRM and Intel's hardware DRM support, I suspect they mean...
Their Nano was scratched to the n-th degree.
They ran a car over it!
This is the first time I've heard that the point of the screen on an iPod is primarily for looking at albums and cover art. Nobody ever told me that albums and cover art were what I was going to miss when I got my Shuffle. no, they were all going on about how I woudln't be able to create and select playlists and songs, rate music, see what the heck I'm playing, and all the basic stuff like that.
If the screen scratches people have observed are bad enough to make that impossible, I'd be much surprised. Still, it's worth a few pennies to keep the display pristine... and that's all it should take: you can get thin vinyl at just about any craft store, and if my experience with it on my Palm is any guide it'll stick fine just through contact, thanks to van-der-waals forces, hydrogen bonding, and cartoon physics. Well, maybe not the last, but it works...
It still does not explain how a corporation, MediaServices, Inc., can sell items that are under US copyright cheaper than a US company can sell the items.
Because a Russian corporation operates under Russian copyright law, and a US corporation operates under US copyright law.
Is this a good example of how the RIAA's pricing scheme is unbalanced?
It's a good example of the difference between the Russian economy and law and the US ecconomy and law.
The pocket DJ is 180
OK, so you need to buy $900 worth of music.
you can get 1 million songs for $5 a month
If you want to rent music, fair enough, but now you're comparing renting to buying and the whole point you were making about the songs being about $0.80 instead of about $1.00 is moot.
We're talking the entire installed base of PCs, Macs, handhelds etc...
No, we're not.
We're talking about Symantec pushing AV software on people who don't need AV software. We're talking about how much damage AV software for platforms that can't usefully use AV software does, compared to the damage from viruses on these platforms.
If you have a PC running Windows, you need AV software.
If you have anything else, you're better off without it.
Symantec's whole point in these scare tactics is to try and convince people to spend money on software that can't do anything but mess them up.
At $200 for the Pocket DJ, and $0.20 cents saved per song, after buying 1000 songs for $800 you'll have saved enough money to justify buying a second music player.
but could you back that statement up with any sort of actual data?
Number of actual viruses in the wild for PalmOS: 0
Number of actual viruses in the wild for Pocket PC: 0
Number of actual viruses in the wild for Mac OS X: 0
Number of people who have lost data due to actual viruses on palmOS, Pocket PC, and Mac OS X: 0
Number of people who have lost data due to malfunctioning antivirus software on PalmOS, Pocket PC, and Mac OS X: more than zero.
There have been cases where AV software has locked up and caused a hard reset on PalmOS or Pocket PC, or caused legitimate mail to be dropped or bounced, and where a false positive from the AV software resulted in an IT department unnecessarily wiping a handheld or computer.
No matter how small a number these represent, any positive integer is greather than zero.
Because iTunes isn't operating out of the ex-Soviet-Union.
Nothing by George Harrison
See "Apple Records vs. Apple Computer".
Symantec makes their money by producing an amazingly complex set of tools for patching up a security failure after the fact. It's in tehir interest to convince as many people on as many systems as possible that this is the best way to deal with security problems.
They have been pulling this kind of thing for years, predicting floods of malware on Palms, Pocket PCs, mobile phones, and I'm sure that game consoles and internet connected coffee machines will be next.
I'm glad they're working on the problem, so if it ever happens that Apple pulls a stupid trick like ActiveX they'll be there, but in the meantime more people have lost data due to false positives from antivirus software on these platforms than have lost data to actual viruses... so I'll steer clear and take everything they say about it with a grain of salt.
If the "user intervention" involves "clicking YES, rape my computer now" on a dialog box, then this is a real problem. Because people are being systematically trained by legitimate websites, including Microsoft's Windows Update to click "YES" in response to routine security dialogs.
Popping up a dialog bex before doing something potentially stupid is not a lot better than going ahead and doing something stupid. DON'T IMPLEMENT THE DANGEROUS CAPABILITY IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The only fix for the problems with "Security Zones" is to get rid of "Security Zones" and have separate applications for trusted and untrusted sources... with no mechanism in the untrusted applications (Internet Explorer) to use the capabilities of the trusted one (Windows Explorer, Software Update, etc).
IBM is expending huge sums of money on open source applications like Linux, Apache, gcc, etc. that people acutally USE and that IBM doesn't own and never owned.
Apple doesn't have IBM-level budgets.
GNUstep is a perfect example. There is absolutely no reference to it I can find on Apple.com.
You can't find a reference to it on most Linux sites either. The Linux community has largely ignored it, and you're expecting Apple to give it any kind of attention?
And the LAST thing Linux/Unix needs is yet another poorly-implemented desktop graphical API.
That's why it needs GNUstep, because it's a well-designed and well-implemented one... as opposed to the KDE/Gnome "let's duplicate Windows" efforts.
NT == Windows./i>
NT is a kernel that can run multiple subsystems on top of it. Currently the only really viable subsystem is Win32, and a lot of that has been moved into the kernel, but the application-visible API under Win32 is basically the same one that ran on Windows 95. The improved shell and everything else they were developing for Windows NT were all thrown away, and the Windows 95 shell was kept.
The result is that while there's the potential of implementing good local security... and that POTNETNIAL is what you're talking about... in practice if you're running REAL applications you have to provide users access to way toomuch stuff just so they can get their work done... even now.
And THAT is the problem. Windows was designed for a single-user environment, and they don't dare fix it.
Darwin is basically a feeble gesture and Apple clearly has no real commitment to the open source community unlike, say, IBM.
When IBM open-sources Lotus Notes, come back and talk to me about IBM's commitment to open source.
IBM is so much bigger than Apple that if Apple were to show that kind of "real commitment" to open source they wouldn't have any resources to do anything but.
Open source people see developing for Darwin as a waste of time
Where did I say anything about developing for Darwin? Darwin's the boring bit, you're much better off with FreeBSD or even Linux for that part of the system. I'm talking about the piles of other stuff they're releasing that Linux Bigots don't even know about because they go (as I already noted) "Ick, Mach" and assume that Darwin's all there is. You're doing it right now... it didn't even occur to you to even see what was on the table... the Apple logo scared you off.
Screw that. Take GNUstep and the other stuff on Apple's repository and make something good out of that. If it benefits Apple, it'll benefit Apple no more than anyone else.
Then why can't I play songs purchased from iTunes on my Creative player?
Turn their old "RIP MIX BURN" ad campaign on its head.
MIX the songs into a playlist about 70 minutes long.
BURN them to CD.
RIP them to MP3.
In some cases there MAY be a detectable loss of quality from the re-encoding, but if you cared about quality you'd have bought the original CD instead of the lossy-compressed online versions anyway.
People forget that Apple sued Microsoft to keep non Apple GUIS off the market.
They sued because Microsoft had made an agreement with them about what they were going to do with Windows. Then Microsoft decided the agreement meant one thing, Apple decided it meant another, and the judge sided with Microsoft.
It was Xerox who sued over whether anyone else could have a GUI. Because, after all, they did invent it. The judge said 'you idiots, you waited too long' and that was the end of it.
Nope. You're wrong. I have a computer here in my collection. It has Microsoft (pre-SCO) Xenix installed on it.
//xds13/dev/ttyd3 to debug a printer. I could even open raw disk devices over the net for remote dumps.
Thats nice.
I ran a network of almost 50 multi-user Xenix systems hooked together with OpenNET, supporting 500 users, sharing the network with and talking to VAXes running DECNET and VMSNET and DOS PCs running Microsoft Lan Manager. That's Microsoft Xenix, Copyright 1982-1984, networked together over Ethernet running multiple network protocols. It had a better networked file system than NFS that gave us remote access to devices and named pipes. I could sit on a VMS box and talk to a process on a Xenix box over a named pipe on Xenix. I could sit on one Xenix box and open
And Microsoft threw all that away and went back to a single-user operating system with NO security at all... and even with all the potential of the NT kernel in hand they have YET to be implement enough local security to keep users from becoming "root" without locking them down into a 'kiosk' mode, and NOW they have the gall to say that nobody could have done better.
EVERYONE did a better job of computer security than Microsoft did in Windows.
INCLUDING Microsoft!
You are certainly looking at history through rose-colored glasses.
History? This is my life.
Old Unix ran RSH by default.
RSH is not part of the design of UNIX. NFS is not part of the design of UNIX... it's not even a fully compatible UNIX file system. These tools, and sendmail, are all applications running under UNIX. There was also OpenNET, FutureNet, the System V suite, the Xenix suite (which Bill Gates certainly knows about), and on and on. All of these are built on top of an operating system that's has from the very start had to work in hostile environments... when you have CS students and professors sharing the same systems, with tests and grades and homework assignments all on the same computer, you need solid multi-user security.
Sendmail? There was one incident involving sendmail's inherently insecure back door, and it was closed.
Let's compare that with Microsoft's track record on Internet Explorer... they integrated IE and the desktop in 1997, this led immediately to a rash of email worms. Instead of backing out the design flaw, instead of doing the equivalent of replacing the rsh suite with ssh, Microsoft applied patch after patch and even went to the mat with the DoJ to keep this fundamentally broken and unfixable design... one that's still being exploited even after XP SP2... in place.
As for local security... it's still not practical to run Windows with a reasonably tight set of local permissions, the kind of environment that was routine for UNIX back in 1980. Would you give students an account and login access to their professor's workstation, running Windows, today? You could get away with that on an only mildly tight UNIX environment, but in Windows?
As for NT... NT itself is a very nice design, with a lot of useful features that have the potential of providing a very secure environment indeed. But NT isn't Microsoft's flagship product. Windows is, and Windows, in practice, is still suffering from being that old single-user wide-open every-application-owns-the-computer system. Yes, you have encrypted passwords on teh wire. But they're encrypted 7 characters at a time from a tiny character set using an insecure algorithm... they might as well have not bothered at all. And their local security... it's a joke, it effectively doesn't exist on anything but a 'kiosk'.
THAT is where Microsoft's problems live. And THAT is the big lie, because the basic security of Windows is far far worse than even Microsoft's old Xenix. And BECAUSE Microsoft sold Xenix (which didn't have rsh, nor sendmail, nor nfs) gates HAS to know that he's lying. Either that or he's astoundingly incompetant - and you don't get to be the richest man in the world by being incompetant.
Frankly, the fact that it took some effort from the community to correct a situation that shouldn't have happend in the first place is evidence that Apple is not really on the up and up.
There was no "situation".
There was nothing to correct. Apple didn't "have to" do anything.
The only "situation" was that some people misinterpreted one of Apple's code releases as being much much more relevant to KHTML than it was and people started bugging the KDE folks about how long it was going to be before they could "integrate Apple's patches".
The thing that was missed is that while Webcore is based on KHTML, but it's not KHTML, and it's never going to merge with KHTML... any more than Darwin and FreeBSD are going to merge: Webcore runs under a completely different graphics system, and while they started out by providing hooks to emulate the KDE environment they quickly moved far beyond that.
Opening up the repository was not necessary, it's not required by anyone, it's something Apple did on their own initiative. Spinning it as something that "took some effort from the community" and was needed to "correct a situation" indicates either profound ignorance of the actual facts, or malicious intent.
Gates: Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not.
The level of balls it takes to tell this big a lie when you know better (and he does know better... Microsoft Xenix was multiuser and networked and was set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together) is astonishing.
His tongue should have burned to ashes in his mouth before it let him say such a thing. He should have been struck by lightning, the plague, and embarassing warts before he got to those lying words. With shingles and boils he should have been afflicted. How can there be any justice in the world when a man can make a claim like that and it passes unchallenged?
As to Apple contributing I give you khtml as an example of where the talk the talk but don't walk the walk.
You're kidding, right?
They didn't ask for any favors, they provided regular snapshots of their source tree, and when a bunch of people in the community got bent out of shape over what turned out to be a complete misunderstanding they went out of their way to accomodate everyone, including putting their source repository on the web.
Anyone who says they "don't walk the walk" has been viewing a filtered reality, in the real one they've gone far beyond what anyone could have expected of them.
Nobody was asking for them because, frankly, Apple's kernel is an obsolete 1980s academia design with poor performance.
And people like you in the Linux-centric part of the free software community are ignoring all the rest of the really nice stuff in the pile of software that Apple's distributing because you're going "Ick, Mach". Personally, I'd rather they didn't use Mach... the 1970's design in Linux and BSD is much easier to get right than a microkernel, and Mach isn't even much of a microkernel... but *damn*, there's some really good stuff in there outside the kernel.
Could take a free operating system and turn it into something people want to pirate. Long live the GPL.
The BSD license is less restrictive than the GPL specifically to allow this. Operating systems using BSD-licensed software include Solaris, HP/UX, Mac OS X, Tru64, AIX, SCO UNIX, Windows NT/2000/XP, and Windows Vista.