For most developers, probably 90% of the benefits of Open Source come from simply being able to see and modify it. For most users, probably 99% of the benefits come from it being free.
For me as a user, the single most important thing about free software is that I know it won't go away.
I've been bitten multiple times by proprietary software being discontinued, forcing me to scramble to find a replacement package and migrate my data. While open data formats help, they're not a panacea. It's a pain in the ass when you suddenly can't buy any more licenses of the software you are using, and it stops working because of changes to the OS. With free software, you can get it fixed and you don't have the license problem.
For video games, I tend to read a few of the top scoring reviews, and a few of the bottom scoring reviews. The former tells me what I'm likely to enjoy about a game, the latter warns me of things that may really annoy me.
Plus, the most amusing reviews tend to be the most vitriolically negative ones.
An XML file with configuration/database information is not an API.
Wikipedia:
Application programming interface (API) is an interface in computer science that defines the ways by which an application program may request services from libraries and/or operating systems.
The iTunes XML library defines the ways in which application programs can request of the operating system the service of locating one or more files from the iTunes library. So it is an API.
I'm not sure how you get one button sync when you have to open a second app first, that's pretty frickin magical.
You set up a hot key, or have a menu bar widget or other always-on-screen control which accepts the single click and fires up the sync code.
But hey, you're erecting an artificial barrier here anyway, it's not like iTunes sync is literally one click either, not from the typical mode where you're playing music.
Blackberry hasn't done it, iTunes hasn't either (obviously), and I don't feel like doing it myself.
Whether BlackBerry or Palm have taken advantage of the available APIs doesn't alter the fact that they have been provided. My guess is that most users don't care that much about ratings and last play times. I know I don't use them.
I'm not sure how that's a rebuff, you still need to open the app and sync the Blackberry, which makes the whole operation three times more complicated and time consuming than necessary.
The app automatically runs and syncs when you plug in the BlackBerry, through the magic of USB device identification.
but that would require yet another annoying process sitting in the background slowing your system down
On a well-written OS, no background process is needed. When the OS detects a USB device has been plugged in, it loads the appropriate driver, which in this case loads the sync code.
None of which will allow a device to be recognized and synched by iTunes,
Which doesn't matter, because you can still build 1-button sync. Who cares whether the button is in iTunes or in some other application? It certainly doesn't matter to me when I sync my BlackBerry.
nor will it allow them to pass information back to the iTunes library database like most played songs, song ratings given on the player itself, and other usefull data.
That can be done by scripting iTunes, if you want to do it. (Yes, I've done it.)
Furthermore, non-iPod users who prefer iTunes must organize and purchase their music with iTunes, save the library, then open up another application to sync to the iTunes library xml file.
Wrong. iTunes updates the XML file automatically whenever something is added to the library. In fact, the XML file is how other Apple applications such as iMovie access the iTunes library.
The fact is, having to rely on the XML file cuts out a lot of functionality, leaving you with only synching music files and not album art or anything else.
The album art is stored in the MP3 files, except in the case of iTunes LPs, which are zip files containing HTML+CSS with PNGs and JPEGs.
Any more imagined issues with the provided APIs that you'd like to invent?
Umm, that was exactly my point. Buying Blu-ray would be fail, because it wouldn't work in the car or in the DVD player in the kids' room or on the iPod while traveling. They'd be locked into playing it on a Blu-ray player. Not a good sales point for a kids' movie.
I have HD, but I haven't bought any Blu-ray discs. I'm still buying DVDs. I can watch DVDs anywhere, whereas I can't watch Blu-ray anywhere but my PS3.
It was the same with copy-protected CDs. People wanted to be able to rip 'em for the iPod; if they couldn't, they wouldn't buy.
Mark/Space produce software which syncs Windows CE devices, Palm devices (including the Pre!) and Android devices with the iTunes library.
Mark/Space and BlackBerry use the supported APIs, so they haven't had any problems with Apple disallowing their sync functionality. (Mark/Space's products have been sold for years now.) Palm are just being lazy, because they don't want to have to write and support their own sync code.
Mark/Space produce software which syncs Windows CE devices, Palm devices (including the Pre!) and Android devices with the iTunes library.
Mark/Space and BlackBerry use the supported APIs, so they haven't had any problems with Apple disallowing their sync functionality. (Mark/Space's products have been sold for years now.) Palm are just being lazy, because they don't want to have to write and support their own sync code.
Sony quickly stepped away from this. They apologized and offered up replacement discs for people who got shafted in this mess. They did nearly everything to make the situation right. Compare this to Microsoft. Owning a major segment of the OS market means never having to say you're sorry.
Yeah, there's absolutely no anti-Microsoft sentiment on Slashdot.
You'd think that, but it does - bizarrely - appear that, for example, Blu-ray is taking off
It does? I just saw an ad for Disney's latest re-release. They're now bundling a DVD and a Blu-ray disc in the same package. They are spinning it as letting consumers take advantage of Blu-ray while getting the portability of DVD, but a less charitable way to put it is that consumers don't want to be locked into Blu-ray and have stayed away in droves, so Disney are giving Blu-ray discs away free with the DVDs in the hope of hooking them.
If Palm have made it that easy to bypass their restrictions, great. Everyone can nominate a friend as the person to be bound by the restrictions and submit the code to the app store, then ignore the restrictions themselves.
But somehow, I suspect their legal agreement has clauses to prevent that.
The developer agreement does include a clause allowing open source distribution as long as you do not distribute Palm's IP or charge a fee for that distribution.
So it's still incompatible with the GPL, then.
(GPL allows you to charge a fee, and doesn't allow you to impose additional restrictions on people such as prohibiting them from charging a fee.)
This is what a lot of people fail to understand about Lotus Notes. It's not supposed to be beautiful and elegant and petite; it's a humongous roll of duct tape. It's ugly, but it gets the job done, and can often get you from nothing to "50%-good solution" in an afternoon.
And what does the Linux kernel target? Desktop, server, mobile, embedded, and just about everything else in between those on a wide variety of different processor architectures. You're trying to compare a Vespa to a mobile home.
And that's exactly the point. Most people don't need a mobile home to drive to work, go to the store, or even to go on vacation. If Linux is going down the path of being a mobile home, that's going to limit its use. It's much easier to attach a trailer to a Mini when you need extra cargo capacity than to try and cut down a Winnebago to make it suitable for city driving.
(And targeting multiple processor architectures is no excuse for bloat anyway.)
Linux has an absolute ton of stuff in it, from support for ancient hardware many users have never heard about to new and experimental stuff that a regular Joe couldn't even afford. This is not a problem that a microkernel could solve.
And why not? OS X doesn't seem to have had its rate of innovation crippled, and it can dynamically install hardware drivers without a reboot when they're written properly.
Basically, my thoughts on seeing the headline were "No shit, Sherlock", followed by "I guess Andy Tanenbaum was right, eh Linus?"
Linus's approach has always been "What the hell, throw it in the kernel". The result is that if you try running Linux on something like a Nokia N800 or N810, where there's only 128MB or 256MB of RAM, it crawls and thrashes even with the swap on flash memory.
Blow a controller? Better hope you have an identical one in stock. You can't just swap out a differing controller of the same brand or pop a different brand in- they all do things ever so slightly differently on the disks.
Fact is, between OS X on the desktop and Linux on servers, I have all the Unixy goodness I need right now. I was a Solaris 2 sysadmin years ago, and while I liked it fine, I'd need a compelling reason to go back to using it. ZFS alone isn't enough, weighed against annoyances like the smaller library of available software.
Right now, I don't trust Oracle's commitment to Solaris. Linux seems to have a lot more development work being done, and so I would like to see OpenSolaris GPL compatible so that it can continue to grow and improve using GPL code even if Oracle drops it. Without that assurance, I just don't see a good case for switching.
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Yes, I'm sure it was just an innocent mistake, and not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate. I bet your handlers at Microsoft told you so, right?
For me as a user, the single most important thing about free software is that I know it won't go away.
I've been bitten multiple times by proprietary software being discontinued, forcing me to scramble to find a replacement package and migrate my data. While open data formats help, they're not a panacea. It's a pain in the ass when you suddenly can't buy any more licenses of the software you are using, and it stops working because of changes to the OS. With free software, you can get it fixed and you don't have the license problem.
For video games, I tend to read a few of the top scoring reviews, and a few of the bottom scoring reviews. The former tells me what I'm likely to enjoy about a game, the latter warns me of things that may really annoy me.
Plus, the most amusing reviews tend to be the most vitriolically negative ones.
Wikipedia:
The iTunes XML library defines the ways in which application programs can request of the operating system the service of locating one or more files from the iTunes library. So it is an API.
You set up a hot key, or have a menu bar widget or other always-on-screen control which accepts the single click and fires up the sync code. But hey, you're erecting an artificial barrier here anyway, it's not like iTunes sync is literally one click either, not from the typical mode where you're playing music.
Whether BlackBerry or Palm have taken advantage of the available APIs doesn't alter the fact that they have been provided. My guess is that most users don't care that much about ratings and last play times. I know I don't use them.
The app automatically runs and syncs when you plug in the BlackBerry, through the magic of USB device identification.
On a well-written OS, no background process is needed. When the OS detects a USB device has been plugged in, it loads the appropriate driver, which in this case loads the sync code.
Which doesn't matter, because you can still build 1-button sync. Who cares whether the button is in iTunes or in some other application? It certainly doesn't matter to me when I sync my BlackBerry.
That can be done by scripting iTunes, if you want to do it. (Yes, I've done it.)
Wrong. iTunes updates the XML file automatically whenever something is added to the library. In fact, the XML file is how other Apple applications such as iMovie access the iTunes library.
The album art is stored in the MP3 files, except in the case of iTunes LPs, which are zip files containing HTML+CSS with PNGs and JPEGs.
Any more imagined issues with the provided APIs that you'd like to invent?
And gaming PCs are far too expensive if you have a console. So what is your point?
Umm, that was exactly my point. Buying Blu-ray would be fail, because it wouldn't work in the car or in the DVD player in the kids' room or on the iPod while traveling. They'd be locked into playing it on a Blu-ray player. Not a good sales point for a kids' movie.
I have HD, but I haven't bought any Blu-ray discs. I'm still buying DVDs. I can watch DVDs anywhere, whereas I can't watch Blu-ray anywhere but my PS3.
It was the same with copy-protected CDs. People wanted to be able to rip 'em for the iPod; if they couldn't, they wouldn't buy.
No, Palm does not need Apple's USB vendor ID in order to enable iTunes media synchronization with the Pre.
BlackBerry just released their desktop software for the Mac, which syncs with iTunes.
Mark/Space produce software which syncs Windows CE devices, Palm devices (including the Pre!) and Android devices with the iTunes library.
Mark/Space and BlackBerry use the supported APIs, so they haven't had any problems with Apple disallowing their sync functionality. (Mark/Space's products have been sold for years now.) Palm are just being lazy, because they don't want to have to write and support their own sync code.
BlackBerry just released their desktop software for the Mac, which syncs with iTunes.
Mark/Space produce software which syncs Windows CE devices, Palm devices (including the Pre!) and Android devices with the iTunes library.
Mark/Space and BlackBerry use the supported APIs, so they haven't had any problems with Apple disallowing their sync functionality. (Mark/Space's products have been sold for years now.) Palm are just being lazy, because they don't want to have to write and support their own sync code.
They don't have to. They just do it because it saves them from having to write their own sync code.
Yeah, there's absolutely no anti-Microsoft sentiment on Slashdot.
It does? I just saw an ad for Disney's latest re-release. They're now bundling a DVD and a Blu-ray disc in the same package. They are spinning it as letting consumers take advantage of Blu-ray while getting the portability of DVD, but a less charitable way to put it is that consumers don't want to be locked into Blu-ray and have stayed away in droves, so Disney are giving Blu-ray discs away free with the DVDs in the hope of hooking them.
If Palm have made it that easy to bypass their restrictions, great. Everyone can nominate a friend as the person to be bound by the restrictions and submit the code to the app store, then ignore the restrictions themselves.
But somehow, I suspect their legal agreement has clauses to prevent that.
So it's still incompatible with the GPL, then.
(GPL allows you to charge a fee, and doesn't allow you to impose additional restrictions on people such as prohibiting them from charging a fee.)
Except that £6 for 2GB is an utterly outrageous markup, given how much the bandwidth is costing the ISP...
Kindle books aren't read-only either. There are annotation and quotation features built in to the Kindle. So you oversimplified somewhat.
This is what a lot of people fail to understand about Lotus Notes. It's not supposed to be beautiful and elegant and petite; it's a humongous roll of duct tape. It's ugly, but it gets the job done, and can often get you from nothing to "50%-good solution" in an afternoon.
[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]
And that's exactly the point. Most people don't need a mobile home to drive to work, go to the store, or even to go on vacation. If Linux is going down the path of being a mobile home, that's going to limit its use. It's much easier to attach a trailer to a Mini when you need extra cargo capacity than to try and cut down a Winnebago to make it suitable for city driving.
(And targeting multiple processor architectures is no excuse for bloat anyway.)
And why not? OS X doesn't seem to have had its rate of innovation crippled, and it can dynamically install hardware drivers without a reboot when they're written properly.
Well, I have an N800, and I wouldn't describe its performance as 'just fine'.
Basically, my thoughts on seeing the headline were "No shit, Sherlock", followed by "I guess Andy Tanenbaum was right, eh Linus?"
Linus's approach has always been "What the hell, throw it in the kernel". The result is that if you try running Linux on something like a Nokia N800 or N810, where there's only 128MB or 256MB of RAM, it crawls and thrashes even with the swap on flash memory.
Meanwhile, Tanenbaum's MINIX requires 16MB of RAM. Good luck getting any kind of Linux to load in that amount of space.
Yeah, but Eno isn't busy re-recording and ruining all his old albums and prohibiting the original versions from being released.
That's why I prefer software RAID.
FSF drone? Ha!
Fact is, between OS X on the desktop and Linux on servers, I have all the Unixy goodness I need right now. I was a Solaris 2 sysadmin years ago, and while I liked it fine, I'd need a compelling reason to go back to using it. ZFS alone isn't enough, weighed against annoyances like the smaller library of available software.
Right now, I don't trust Oracle's commitment to Solaris. Linux seems to have a lot more development work being done, and so I would like to see OpenSolaris GPL compatible so that it can continue to grow and improve using GPL code even if Oracle drops it. Without that assurance, I just don't see a good case for switching.
...release it under GPL 3 and I'll give it a go.
Until it's at least compatible with GPL licensing, forget it.