First time I looked at Go, my conclusion was "this language isn't ready". The next time I looked at Go, I concluded that it had essentially bled to death. But the release of version 1 changes things. I will take another look. I hope they've worked out enough of the details for me to be able to tell if this is a language I would love to work with or not.
Thanks for the explanation. So you just send lots and lots of them until you detect enough of them to decode the signal? That's what I thought, but I am not a particle physicist, just an interested amateur.:-)
So, neutrinos are very good at traveling right through what we think of as solid objects. They also have no electric charge (nor magnetic charge, heh). If you use them to encode a signal, how do you receive the signal? How do the neutrinos interact with your receiver?
The death of FOSS is going to be when people stop using it. Or, in the case at hand, refuse to start using it. WebM may or may not be as good as H.264 technically, but if we always dismissed every free solution on that basis, we would never have gotten GNU, or Linux, or Firefox, or KHTML/WebKit/Chrome, etc.
Which is not to say we should adopt every free project, inferior or superior, just because they're free, but we should recognize which ones have potential and run with them where this makes sense. That way, we will bring the next free success to fruition, rather than letting it wither.
The truth is, commercial interests are pushing the options that they expect to make them money, because that's what they are in business for. If we want open standards to succeed, we are going to have to put in effort. We're swimming against the tide of old boys networks and marketing. Having said that, history shows that the more open options often win in the long run, so, even though major forces oppose freedom, it's a battle that those who fight for freedom can win.
The question you will have to answer for yourself is: Would you rather push for open standards and a world in which everybody is free to participate, or are you happy with the shiny stuff that is pushed by the commercial powers who will limit freedom, and the new shiny stuff they will be replacing it with in a few years? Both have their merits, both will make the world a better place, and both will give you shiny new tech to play with, so, in my opinion, both answers are right. I do, however, prefer the former. Let's get the open tech now, and then make it shinier, rather than going with the shinier tech now and having the same status quo next year.
W.r.t. your appeal to pragmatism: that works both ways. Both H.264 and WebM are here now, so adopting either is a pragmatic choice. Going with the one that has is currently most widely supported (H.264) is a pragmatic choice. Going with the one (WebM) that doesn't put up barriers in the form of royalties that need to be paid is a pragmatic choice. If you pick one today (which would be the pragmatic way to move forward), and later find out you would rather have had the other, you can always change direction then. On the other hand, why pick one if you can have both? Certainly you can implement WebM everywhere. It's royalty-free, after all. And if the user installs codecs for H.264, or whatever other codec really, why not use them? I've always found the discussion about what codec to support in the browser rather silly. My answer: none. It's going to be obsolete in 10 years anyway. Let plugins handle it. As for mandating support for a format in the standard, I really only want to go with an open standard there. Let's not go force some royalty scheme on users of the standard - that wouldn't be pragmatic.
Unrelated: It's also interesting to note that after years of $8 fuel in Europe, they have adapted with small diesels. There is little to no sign of the renewable fuels you hear being pitched by politicians on both sides of the pond.
Politicians are pitching those? I hadn't noticed. In the Netherlands at least, there is interest in running cars on biofuels (especially biodiesel and straight vegetable oil), but the government makes this unattractive by imposing excise tax on it just as they do for fossil fuels. Carbon neutral fuels, but you still have to pay the tax which people have always told me was partially there to discourage people from polluting the environment.
Unsurprisingly, few people go for the cars that can run on biofuels or the conversion kits that make existing cars able to run on them. Instead, people go for hybrids, which are supported by tax breaks and therefore financially attractive, especially when leased, regardless of actual benefits to the environment.
Germany, on the other hand, seems to be doing much better. Last I checked, they didn't tax biofuels as highly as fossil fuels, and you could get biofuel at various pumps. As someone who looked into this once told me, they also don't have Shell.
As I keep telling my fellow software developers, time is one of those things in software that tend to go wrong. Few developers give it the attention it deserves. Between different formats, timezones, changing timezones (including DST), leap seconds, and limits on what can be represented, there is plenty of opportunity for errors. And contrary to what you might hope, using an existing library to handle time does not absolve you from having to think about it, nor does that library always get it right.
Also, if for some reason, this makes you not want to use KWin anymore, no problem! Just use one of the many other window managers. You can even do that and still use KDE.
I haven't heavily used Linux since I was in highschool. What's up with the graphics situation on it? I always hear/see problems with it, and I find it confusing because it's such a fundamental thing
I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Accelerated 3D on Linux is hit-and-miss. Therefore, people don't often use it for things that require that. Therefore, there isn't that much of an incentive to improve things.
On the other hand, both nVidia and Intel actually support Linux, and have done so for years. AMD and Via have paid lip service for years, but their drivers don't work very well in practice. Then there are the drivers developed by the community, which tend to lack features and performance for newer hardware. The gap in features and performance is closing, but the definition of "newer hardware" keeps shifting so that, pretty, much you will get severely degraded performance compared to the state of the art, either because the drivers aren't fast, or because the hardware isn't fast. There seem to simply not be enough knowledgeable hackers to make the community drivers keep up with developments in hardware land.
From my perspective, part of the problem is that everything is a moving target. Graphics hardware is a moving target, because the hardware interface changes in incompatible ways. OpenGL is a moving target, both the core and the extensions. Linux is a moving target. And on top of that, the *AA are trying to stuff in Digital Restrictions Management, too.
I think if you look at the history of graphics on Linux, things come in waves. At some point, there used to be good support for common SVGA cards. Then there was an explosion of new graphics hardware, and Linux couldn't keep up. There wasn't even a VESA driver, which would have worked on all of them. Then, the graphics card market consolidated, and things became better. 2D would pretty much work. Xv would often work, too. 3D became the next battle. nVidia quickly decided to conquer the Linux and FreeBSD market, and have dominated pretty much since that time. But their drivers aren't open source. Intel decided some years ago to fill that gap. Their hardware wasn't all that fast, but is getting better all the time. ATI has gone back and forth; at some point, their cards were preferred, because the specs were available and there were good open source drivers. Alas, since the R600 / HD2000 or so, the hardware interface is different, and the open source drivers haven't caught up. ATI's closed source drivers have always been pretty bad. They're fast if they work, but usually have problems.
At least brein doesn't sue individual downloaders for 10k per song
Maybe be don't, but last I saw them in action, they were telling people lies about how copyright law works in the Netherlands. They were telling people that things were illegal that actually weren't. Also, I think one of their high-ranking members was actually caught breaking copyright law.
I am glad people are not simply folding to BREIN's threats, but actually tell them to go convince a court that they got the law on their side this time.
Nothing wrong with companies trying to make money.
I'd just rather you compete for my money by making the best product at the best price, rather than focusing your resources on making the best scheme to extract money from people who have already paid for the product.
Of course it makes no economical sense to do that. That's because we're not trying to solve an economical problem.
I think this is something that can be argued about, too. It sort of depends on what you include in your definition of economics. Is it about how much money the large corporations make? Is it about the gross domestic product? GDP per capita? Adjusted for inflation? Does it go beyond money - do we include things like having food on your plate? Perhaps average quality of life? Do we try to factor in externalities, e.g. effects on other countries or other generations?
I think there is no question that both taking measures or not taking measures to reduce COâ emissions will have _some_ effect under any reasonable definition of economics. But people like to pit the economy against the environment, and I think that is doing the world a disservice. They interact, and it's not one or the other. It's entirely possible that they would go hand in hand. Numerous green tech companies are likely to agree with me. Some people save money on their cars now that they don't have to put in as much gasoline.
In other instances, you may have to choose between more money and something else. I think that is an entirely economical issue. Even if you choose something else, that's entirely within the realm of economics. You're optimizing for something, and that something doesn't have to be money.
So, I would argue that we _are_ trying to solve an economical problem. We are concerned about the environment and what effects our activities may have on our future quality of life. We are trying to factor that into the big economic equation, and trying to figure out if we will get the best results with laissez-faire or with some sort of regulation. I think that we will find that (1) it is impossible to figure out exactly where the optimum is, but also (2) it won't be completely laissez-faire and it won't be completely puppet strings, either, and (3) there will be some terrible ideas, some brilliant ideas, and a lot of incremental improvements.
I've always thought that apt (apt-get, aptitude, Debian) has the right solution to this.
You get your software from a repository, and only software that is approved by the maintainers of the repository gets in.
Then, _you_ get to choose which repositories you trust.
That way, you don't have to judge the quality of all software yourself. You can leave that to the people who maintain the repositories. They will build up reputation over time, and you can go with the ones that have a good enough reputation by your standards.
A walled-garden app store like Apple's basically implements the first part of this. This is fine for a lot of people.
To also cater to those who want more freedom, without opening the flood gates, all you have to do is allow them to shop at other app stores, as well.
Perhaps, if they can't coordinate and get a single signal out where it concerns their public image, that's a good reason for splitting up the company. Might actually make them more efficient, too.
Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past.
I don't know why people think illegal copying of PC games is a big problem that threatens the future of gaming on the PC. In the 1980s and early 1990s, every single PC game I ever saw was pirated. I don't even know where one would have gone to buy a game. People gave each other illegally copied games as gifts. As far as I can see, that hasn't killed the PC game industry.
Personally, I think that publishers should not worry about how many copies are created illegally, but about how much revenue they make. If revenue is high enough to cover your costs and make you a profit, you're doing well. Software piracy affects revenue in complex ways; on the one hand, if people can play your game for free, they may be less likely to pay for it. On the other hand, more copies made leads to more people seeing the game, which may increase sales. I am sure that piracy increases revenue for some software. I would not be surprised if it decreased revenue for other software.
As for DRM, I think the story is somewhat less complex. I will not pirate your game. If I like it, I will pay for it. If the DRM is too intrusive, I won't like it. Many others think the same way. On the other hand, most if not all DRM schemes are eventually circumvented. So adding the DRM increases your cost, may hurt your sales, and won't stop piracy. And even if it did stop piracy, it is not clear that this would increase your revenue.
the flaw affects a long list of technologies, including PHP, ASP.NET, Java, Python, Ruby, Apache Tomcat, Apache Geronimo, Jetty, and Glassfish, as well as Google's open source JavaScript engine V8
the theory behind such attacks has been known since at least 2003
Klink and WÃlde showed that "PHP 5, Java, ASP.NET as well as V8 are fully vulnerable to this issue and PHP 4, Python and Ruby are partially vulnerable, depending on version or whether the server running the code is a 32-bit or 64-bit machine
The actual vulnerability seems to be that many web applications (or application servers or libraries or what have you) parse form data from HTTP POST requests into hash tables, using known hashing algorithms. If an attacker sends a POST request using specifically crafted parameter names that all hash to the same value, inserting these into the hash table will take O(n^2) time, which opens up affected software to a denial of service attack.
Yes, but I mean people are outraged that GoDaddy would be doing such a thing as supporting SOPA, while GoDaddy has been doing objectionable things for years.
Why were you guys even with that company in the first place? I mean, yeah, they're cheap, but I would rather go with a registrar where I didn't have to worry about what sort of stunt they would be pulling next. As it turns out, those aren't even necessarily more expensive. So, really, why are people still using GoDaddy?
That's great... Yesterday, I figured I'll just leave my 15 domains there since they backed off their support.. but apparently only in words.
This is not aimed at you personally, but I just have to get it off my chest: if by now you still haven't figured out that GoDaddy aren't the Good Guys, then I don't know why SOPA would change your mind. Seriously. It isn't like the GoDaddy badness isn't well documented or hasn't been going on for years. It's like they're _trying_ to be the most evil they can be.
What are these problems? What companies are saying "we won't go for GPL again because of problems in the past"? Does this actually have a significant impact on GPL usage?
It is easy to assume that companies wouldn't be happy with the GPL because it restricts what they can do, but that doesn't mean that this is actually how it works out in practice.
This is really exciting. Personally, I can't wait for the Raspberry Pi to start shipping and I will definitely get a few, but if Rhombus can pull this off, that will be fantastic, too!
WordPerfect doesn't have that open source feature. It can be killed, and I believe it has been.
I have little doubt that, had WordPerfect been open source, it would have become the word processor of choice on platforms where MS Office wasn't available. It still had a lot of mind share in the mid to late 1990s, when Linux was gaining steam. I don't know how profitable the WordPerfect business has been since then, but Novell/Corel might have been better off if they had released it as open source at the time.
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First time I looked at Go, my conclusion was "this language isn't ready". The next time I looked at Go, I concluded that it had essentially bled to death. But the release of version 1 changes things. I will take another look. I hope they've worked out enough of the details for me to be able to tell if this is a language I would love to work with or not.
Yes. I mean, if it were any other phone, a misdemeanor would be enough, but if it's an iPhone, then definitely a felony.
Thanks for the explanation. So you just send lots and lots of them until you detect enough of them to decode the signal? That's what I thought, but I am not a particle physicist, just an interested amateur. :-)
So, neutrinos are very good at traveling right through what we think of as solid objects. They also have no electric charge (nor magnetic charge, heh). If you use them to encode a signal, how do you receive the signal? How do the neutrinos interact with your receiver?
The death of FOSS is going to be when people stop using it. Or, in the case at hand, refuse to start using it. WebM may or may not be as good as H.264 technically, but if we always dismissed every free solution on that basis, we would never have gotten GNU, or Linux, or Firefox, or KHTML/WebKit/Chrome, etc.
Which is not to say we should adopt every free project, inferior or superior, just because they're free, but we should recognize which ones have potential and run with them where this makes sense. That way, we will bring the next free success to fruition, rather than letting it wither.
The truth is, commercial interests are pushing the options that they expect to make them money, because that's what they are in business for. If we want open standards to succeed, we are going to have to put in effort. We're swimming against the tide of old boys networks and marketing. Having said that, history shows that the more open options often win in the long run, so, even though major forces oppose freedom, it's a battle that those who fight for freedom can win.
The question you will have to answer for yourself is: Would you rather push for open standards and a world in which everybody is free to participate, or are you happy with the shiny stuff that is pushed by the commercial powers who will limit freedom, and the new shiny stuff they will be replacing it with in a few years? Both have their merits, both will make the world a better place, and both will give you shiny new tech to play with, so, in my opinion, both answers are right. I do, however, prefer the former. Let's get the open tech now, and then make it shinier, rather than going with the shinier tech now and having the same status quo next year.
W.r.t. your appeal to pragmatism: that works both ways. Both H.264 and WebM are here now, so adopting either is a pragmatic choice. Going with the one that has is currently most widely supported (H.264) is a pragmatic choice. Going with the one (WebM) that doesn't put up barriers in the form of royalties that need to be paid is a pragmatic choice. If you pick one today (which would be the pragmatic way to move forward), and later find out you would rather have had the other, you can always change direction then. On the other hand, why pick one if you can have both? Certainly you can implement WebM everywhere. It's royalty-free, after all. And if the user installs codecs for H.264, or whatever other codec really, why not use them? I've always found the discussion about what codec to support in the browser rather silly. My answer: none. It's going to be obsolete in 10 years anyway. Let plugins handle it. As for mandating support for a format in the standard, I really only want to go with an open standard there. Let's not go force some royalty scheme on users of the standard - that wouldn't be pragmatic.
Unrelated: It's also interesting to note that after years of $8 fuel in Europe, they have adapted with small diesels. There is little to no sign of the renewable fuels you hear being pitched by politicians on both sides of the pond.
Politicians are pitching those? I hadn't noticed. In the Netherlands at least, there is interest in running cars on biofuels (especially biodiesel and straight vegetable oil), but the government makes this unattractive by imposing excise tax on it just as they do for fossil fuels. Carbon neutral fuels, but you still have to pay the tax which people have always told me was partially there to discourage people from polluting the environment.
Unsurprisingly, few people go for the cars that can run on biofuels or the conversion kits that make existing cars able to run on them. Instead, people go for hybrids, which are supported by tax breaks and therefore financially attractive, especially when leased, regardless of actual benefits to the environment.
Germany, on the other hand, seems to be doing much better. Last I checked, they didn't tax biofuels as highly as fossil fuels, and you could get biofuel at various pumps. As someone who looked into this once told me, they also don't have Shell.
As I keep telling my fellow software developers, time is one of those things in software that tend to go wrong. Few developers give it the attention it deserves. Between different formats, timezones, changing timezones (including DST), leap seconds, and limits on what can be represented, there is plenty of opportunity for errors. And contrary to what you might hope, using an existing library to handle time does not absolve you from having to think about it, nor does that library always get it right.
Exactly.
Also, if for some reason, this makes you not want to use KWin anymore, no problem! Just use one of the many other window managers. You can even do that and still use KDE.
I haven't heavily used Linux since I was in highschool. What's up with the graphics situation on it? I always hear/see problems with it, and I find it confusing because it's such a fundamental thing
I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Accelerated 3D on Linux is hit-and-miss. Therefore, people don't often use it for things that require that. Therefore, there isn't that much of an incentive to improve things.
On the other hand, both nVidia and Intel actually support Linux, and have done so for years. AMD and Via have paid lip service for years, but their drivers don't work very well in practice. Then there are the drivers developed by the community, which tend to lack features and performance for newer hardware. The gap in features and performance is closing, but the definition of "newer hardware" keeps shifting so that, pretty, much you will get severely degraded performance compared to the state of the art, either because the drivers aren't fast, or because the hardware isn't fast. There seem to simply not be enough knowledgeable hackers to make the community drivers keep up with developments in hardware land.
From my perspective, part of the problem is that everything is a moving target. Graphics hardware is a moving target, because the hardware interface changes in incompatible ways. OpenGL is a moving target, both the core and the extensions. Linux is a moving target. And on top of that, the *AA are trying to stuff in Digital Restrictions Management, too.
I think if you look at the history of graphics on Linux, things come in waves. At some point, there used to be good support for common SVGA cards. Then there was an explosion of new graphics hardware, and Linux couldn't keep up. There wasn't even a VESA driver, which would have worked on all of them. Then, the graphics card market consolidated, and things became better. 2D would pretty much work. Xv would often work, too. 3D became the next battle. nVidia quickly decided to conquer the Linux and FreeBSD market, and have dominated pretty much since that time. But their drivers aren't open source. Intel decided some years ago to fill that gap. Their hardware wasn't all that fast, but is getting better all the time. ATI has gone back and forth; at some point, their cards were preferred, because the specs were available and there were good open source drivers. Alas, since the R600 / HD2000 or so, the hardware interface is different, and the open source drivers haven't caught up. ATI's closed source drivers have always been pretty bad. They're fast if they work, but usually have problems.
What I would like to know is: Why does this happen? How do these bad keys get generated? Why so many of them?
At least brein doesn't sue individual downloaders for 10k per song
Maybe be don't, but last I saw them in action, they were telling people lies about how copyright law works in the Netherlands. They were telling people that things were illegal that actually weren't. Also, I think one of their high-ranking members was actually caught breaking copyright law.
I am glad people are not simply folding to BREIN's threats, but actually tell them to go convince a court that they got the law on their side this time.
Dear Curt Shilling,
Nothing wrong with companies trying to make money.
I'd just rather you compete for my money by making the best product at the best price, rather than focusing your resources on making the best scheme to extract money from people who have already paid for the product.
Kind regards,
One Potential Customer
I think this is something that can be argued about, too. It sort of depends on what you include in your definition of economics. Is it about how much money the large corporations make? Is it about the gross domestic product? GDP per capita? Adjusted for inflation? Does it go beyond money - do we include things like having food on your plate? Perhaps average quality of life? Do we try to factor in externalities, e.g. effects on other countries or other generations?
I think there is no question that both taking measures or not taking measures to reduce COâ emissions will have _some_ effect under any reasonable definition of economics. But people like to pit the economy against the environment, and I think that is doing the world a disservice. They interact, and it's not one or the other. It's entirely possible that they would go hand in hand. Numerous green tech companies are likely to agree with me. Some people save money on their cars now that they don't have to put in as much gasoline.
In other instances, you may have to choose between more money and something else. I think that is an entirely economical issue. Even if you choose something else, that's entirely within the realm of economics. You're optimizing for something, and that something doesn't have to be money.
So, I would argue that we _are_ trying to solve an economical problem. We are concerned about the environment and what effects our activities may have on our future quality of life. We are trying to factor that into the big economic equation, and trying to figure out if we will get the best results with laissez-faire or with some sort of regulation. I think that we will find that (1) it is impossible to figure out exactly where the optimum is, but also (2) it won't be completely laissez-faire and it won't be completely puppet strings, either, and (3) there will be some terrible ideas, some brilliant ideas, and a lot of incremental improvements.
I've always thought that apt (apt-get, aptitude, Debian) has the right solution to this.
You get your software from a repository, and only software that is approved by the maintainers of the repository gets in.
Then, _you_ get to choose which repositories you trust.
That way, you don't have to judge the quality of all software yourself. You can leave that to the people who maintain the repositories. They will build up reputation over time, and you can go with the ones that have a good enough reputation by your standards.
A walled-garden app store like Apple's basically implements the first part of this. This is fine for a lot of people.
To also cater to those who want more freedom, without opening the flood gates, all you have to do is allow them to shop at other app stores, as well.
Great idea! I want to build the next Google, too!
natural aging, can be reversed by an infusion of stem cell rich blood from younger mice
Drink young blood, stay young forever...now where have I heard that before?
Perhaps, if they can't coordinate and get a single signal out where it concerns their public image, that's a good reason for splitting up the company. Might actually make them more efficient, too.
Paranoia, it's not just for the fringe anymore.
Why it makes for a nice soundbite, I think that people who call it paranoia have it wrong. Remember, RMS started GNU and the FSF _after_ They came after him: http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-richard-stallman.html
Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past.
I don't know why people think illegal copying of PC games is a big problem that threatens the future of gaming on the PC. In the 1980s and early 1990s, every single PC game I ever saw was pirated. I don't even know where one would have gone to buy a game. People gave each other illegally copied games as gifts. As far as I can see, that hasn't killed the PC game industry.
Personally, I think that publishers should not worry about how many copies are created illegally, but about how much revenue they make. If revenue is high enough to cover your costs and make you a profit, you're doing well. Software piracy affects revenue in complex ways; on the one hand, if people can play your game for free, they may be less likely to pay for it. On the other hand, more copies made leads to more people seeing the game, which may increase sales. I am sure that piracy increases revenue for some software. I would not be surprised if it decreased revenue for other software.
As for DRM, I think the story is somewhat less complex. I will not pirate your game. If I like it, I will pay for it. If the DRM is too intrusive, I won't like it. Many others think the same way. On the other hand, most if not all DRM schemes are eventually circumvented. So adding the DRM increases your cost, may hurt your sales, and won't stop piracy. And even if it did stop piracy, it is not clear that this would increase your revenue.
Here is a better writeup from Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/huge-portions-of-web-vulnerable-to-hashing-denial-of-service-attack.ars
From that page:
the flaw affects a long list of technologies, including PHP, ASP.NET, Java, Python, Ruby, Apache Tomcat, Apache Geronimo, Jetty, and Glassfish, as well as Google's open source JavaScript engine V8
the theory behind such attacks has been known since at least 2003
Klink and WÃlde showed that "PHP 5, Java, ASP.NET as well as V8 are fully vulnerable to this issue and PHP 4, Python and Ruby are partially vulnerable, depending on version or whether the server running the code is a 32-bit or 64-bit machine
The actual vulnerability seems to be that many web applications (or application servers or libraries or what have you) parse form data from HTTP POST requests into hash tables, using known hashing algorithms. If an attacker sends a POST request using specifically crafted parameter names that all hash to the same value, inserting these into the hash table will take O(n^2) time, which opens up affected software to a denial of service attack.
Yes, but I mean people are outraged that GoDaddy would be doing such a thing as supporting SOPA, while GoDaddy has been doing objectionable things for years.
Why were you guys even with that company in the first place? I mean, yeah, they're cheap, but I would rather go with a registrar where I didn't have to worry about what sort of stunt they would be pulling next. As it turns out, those aren't even necessarily more expensive. So, really, why are people still using GoDaddy?
That's great... Yesterday, I figured I'll just leave my 15 domains there since they backed off their support.. but apparently only in words.
This is not aimed at you personally, but I just have to get it off my chest: if by now you still haven't figured out that GoDaddy aren't the Good Guys, then I don't know why SOPA would change your mind. Seriously. It isn't like the GoDaddy badness isn't well documented or hasn't been going on for years. It's like they're _trying_ to be the most evil they can be.
GPL caused too many problems for companies
[citation needed]
What are these problems? What companies are saying "we won't go for GPL again because of problems in the past"? Does this actually have a significant impact on GPL usage?
It is easy to assume that companies wouldn't be happy with the GPL because it restricts what they can do, but that doesn't mean that this is actually how it works out in practice.
This is really exciting. Personally, I can't wait for the Raspberry Pi to start shipping and I will definitely get a few, but if Rhombus can pull this off, that will be fantastic, too!
WordPerfect doesn't have that open source feature. It can be killed, and I believe it has been.
I have little doubt that, had WordPerfect been open source, it would have become the word processor of choice on platforms where MS Office wasn't available. It still had a lot of mind share in the mid to late 1990s, when Linux was gaining steam. I don't know how profitable the WordPerfect business has been since then, but Novell/Corel might have been better off if they had released it as open source at the time.