The space argument is the most stupid argument ever. It takes up *EXACTLY* the same amount of space that Word or Excel used for toolbars and menus before. And, it has a feature you can't do in the old version, make the buttons disappear with a single keystroke. (not the same as fullscreen, which is still there as well).
Uhh.. you change the paragraph indentation in Word the same way you've don it since.. I think the very first version. Drag the slider on the ruler to the point where you want the indentation to be. If you want a hanging indent, then you move the other slider back. How exactly is this new?
Alternatively, you could have just clicked the advanced options button in the lower right corner of the paragraph ribbon section and Indent is the second grouping on the first tab.
Without firefox taking significant market share away, MS looked likely to never bother updating IE...
I'm not sure about that. Microsoft has traditionally released browsers in conjunction with major OS releases. There was no major OS release between 2001 and 2006.
IE 6 was released with XP, IE7 with vista, IE8 with Windows 7. IE 9 has broken that cycle, but only because of the HTML5 push for Windows phone and Windows 8 development. Developers need a platform to develop those apps before those OS's are released.
There are literally millions of different chips out there, often times doing exactly the same as one other except for some small variation. You only make a new chip when you can't find an existing one that does what you want (or that you can't adapt to do what you want).
Libraries are often not designed as well as chips are. That often makes them much harder to adapt to what you need.
Secunia uses their own standard for criticality, and does not rely on the vendors reported standard. So Secunia evaluates both equally with the same standard.
So your argument is stupid, because it's irrelevant to this comprison.
Not true at all. People can profit from software the same way people profit from free software today.
They can either charge a boat load for the first copy, or they can contractually obligate their purchasers to pay them large amounts of money if they give it to someone else.
Or, they can make their money off support. If they don't give out source code, then nobody else can support it, thus they're the only source of support.
Considering that so many developers haven't gone through CS degrees, it's pretty easy to understand. There's lots of developers with no degree at all. There's lots of developers with degrees in other fields. There's lots of developers that too community college courses that don't provide a full CS discipline.
It's very easy to expect 1 in 10,000 knows assembler. In fact, of the 40 or 50 programmers I know personnaly, i'm the only one that knows assembler.
What the FSF believes the GPL means is not necessarily what a judge would interpret it to mean.
The article says they don't know if the binary builds are modified or not, so the claim that they are seems to have no substance to it. And, I believe the source download does include the Calibre source code unmodified.
Actually, you are also only partially correct. While you're correct that Microsoft licensed the code in 1990, the copyrights on the code (as found via a strings search) shows the copyright date on the code is 1983. This is the code that Spider licensed from Berkeley, and it predates the BSD license. Spider was licensed to resell the code.
My understanding is that the binary is Hamstersofts code, and that they are distributing the Calibre code, along with the wrapper code they wrote to interface it with their binary code.
I have read nothing about a modified calibre binary.
Actually, it's a myth that Microsoft used BSDL code. It's true, they used code from the Berkeley Standard Distribution of Unix, but this code predates the BSDL license and Microsoft paid for the license.
So, what they used was a non-BSDL licensed version of the code, and thus they did not have to conform to the BSDL license.
Huh? The same reasons would apply to not share the code. To make it harder for others to use your code to take money out of your pockets. If it becomes legal to reverse engineer and share the source code, then business will spend more effort protecting their code from reverse engineering.. making it even more obfuscated, encrypting it at multiple levels, etc...
The GPL does not require all code in an application to be released, only when such code is considered a "derived work". There are lots of examples of how you can legally get around the GPL, such as by making the code into it's own executable and shelling out to it, or making it a web service, or any number of other physical seperations.
There's even a lot of dissent within the community as to whether DLL's are considered derived works. The FSF thinks they are, but lots of other lawys think they're not.
This looks to me like the exact same situation of an application shelling out to a gpl'd app. This is allowed by the GPL, and is even explicitly allowed in the GPL faq IIRC.
There is a huge debate in the open source legal community as to whether DLL's are considered "derived works", and there's lots of law on both sides to support their case. This probably won't be solved until a legal case decides the issue. So, until that time, it's just a case of everyone having an opinion, and it's not a clear cut case of violation.
Actually, no. The only way to enforce code sharing is via the GPL, and thus copyright. Without copyright, nobody would be forced to share their code, even if they took it from someone else.
Of course, you would be free to reverse engineer it, but it wouldn't be the same as what you get from the GPL. Basically, the entire concept of the FSF's idea of free software requires copyright in order to exist.
You can't make every feature in your face obvious. That clutters the UI, and makes it harder for users. You have to make more advanced features less obvious, or else it ruins the usability of the interface. Further, I don't consider right clicking on something to be all that un-obvious. We've been using context menus for almost 20 years now.
We're not talking about clueless people here. We're talking about slashdot users, and those in other forums for technical support. These are more advanced users, and those perfectly capable of digging around.
As I said in another post, this is not basic functionality, it's more advanced and there's nothing wrong with more advanced functionality needing to have some knowledge to utilize.
Slashdot Mirror
The space argument is the most stupid argument ever. It takes up *EXACTLY* the same amount of space that Word or Excel used for toolbars and menus before. And, it has a feature you can't do in the old version, make the buttons disappear with a single keystroke. (not the same as fullscreen, which is still there as well).
Try this next time you use Word 2007/10, Ctrl-F1.
Uhh.. you change the paragraph indentation in Word the same way you've don it since.. I think the very first version. Drag the slider on the ruler to the point where you want the indentation to be. If you want a hanging indent, then you move the other slider back. How exactly is this new?
Alternatively, you could have just clicked the advanced options button in the lower right corner of the paragraph ribbon section and Indent is the second grouping on the first tab.
I bet if you pulled the hard drive out of a modern version of Linux and hooked it up to a PII, your experience would be highly different.
I'm not sure about that. Microsoft has traditionally released browsers in conjunction with major OS releases. There was no major OS release between 2001 and 2006.
IE 6 was released with XP, IE7 with vista, IE8 with Windows 7. IE 9 has broken that cycle, but only because of the HTML5 push for Windows phone and Windows 8 development. Developers need a platform to develop those apps before those OS's are released.
There are literally millions of different chips out there, often times doing exactly the same as one other except for some small variation. You only make a new chip when you can't find an existing one that does what you want (or that you can't adapt to do what you want).
Libraries are often not designed as well as chips are. That often makes them much harder to adapt to what you need.
IE7 is almost 5 years old. IE9 no longer has the drop down.
Secunia uses their own standard for criticality, and does not rely on the vendors reported standard. So Secunia evaluates both equally with the same standard.
So your argument is stupid, because it's irrelevant to this comprison.
Not true at all. People can profit from software the same way people profit from free software today.
They can either charge a boat load for the first copy, or they can contractually obligate their purchasers to pay them large amounts of money if they give it to someone else.
Or, they can make their money off support. If they don't give out source code, then nobody else can support it, thus they're the only source of support.
Considering that so many developers haven't gone through CS degrees, it's pretty easy to understand. There's lots of developers with no degree at all. There's lots of developers with degrees in other fields. There's lots of developers that too community college courses that don't provide a full CS discipline.
It's very easy to expect 1 in 10,000 knows assembler. In fact, of the 40 or 50 programmers I know personnaly, i'm the only one that knows assembler.
The article says they don't know if the binaries are modified or not.
What the FSF believes the GPL means is not necessarily what a judge would interpret it to mean.
The article says they don't know if the binary builds are modified or not, so the claim that they are seems to have no substance to it. And, I believe the source download does include the Calibre source code unmodified.
Actually, you are also only partially correct. While you're correct that Microsoft licensed the code in 1990, the copyrights on the code (as found via a strings search) shows the copyright date on the code is 1983. This is the code that Spider licensed from Berkeley, and it predates the BSD license. Spider was licensed to resell the code.
Well, i would guess less than .01% of all software developers know assembly. So it's pretty rare, and it requires a lot more skill to master.
My understanding is that the binary is Hamstersofts code, and that they are distributing the Calibre code, along with the wrapper code they wrote to interface it with their binary code.
I have read nothing about a modified calibre binary.
Copyright Infringement, not "copyright violation"
Actually, it's a myth that Microsoft used BSDL code. It's true, they used code from the Berkeley Standard Distribution of Unix, but this code predates the BSDL license and Microsoft paid for the license.
So, what they used was a non-BSDL licensed version of the code, and thus they did not have to conform to the BSDL license.
Huh? The same reasons would apply to not share the code. To make it harder for others to use your code to take money out of your pockets. If it becomes legal to reverse engineer and share the source code, then business will spend more effort protecting their code from reverse engineering.. making it even more obfuscated, encrypting it at multiple levels, etc...
The GPL does not require all code in an application to be released, only when such code is considered a "derived work". There are lots of examples of how you can legally get around the GPL, such as by making the code into it's own executable and shelling out to it, or making it a web service, or any number of other physical seperations.
There's even a lot of dissent within the community as to whether DLL's are considered derived works. The FSF thinks they are, but lots of other lawys think they're not.
This looks to me like the exact same situation of an application shelling out to a gpl'd app. This is allowed by the GPL, and is even explicitly allowed in the GPL faq IIRC.
There is a huge debate in the open source legal community as to whether DLL's are considered "derived works", and there's lots of law on both sides to support their case. This probably won't be solved until a legal case decides the issue. So, until that time, it's just a case of everyone having an opinion, and it's not a clear cut case of violation.
I'm sorry, but a commented dissassembly does me almost no good if I don't know assembler (I do, but most people don't).
Who said anything about a web page? What a stupid argument.
Well, IE and Chrome both do it the same way, and have for quite some time. So in that sense, Firefox is just bringing parity.
Actually, no. The only way to enforce code sharing is via the GPL, and thus copyright. Without copyright, nobody would be forced to share their code, even if they took it from someone else.
Of course, you would be free to reverse engineer it, but it wouldn't be the same as what you get from the GPL. Basically, the entire concept of the FSF's idea of free software requires copyright in order to exist.
You can't make every feature in your face obvious. That clutters the UI, and makes it harder for users. You have to make more advanced features less obvious, or else it ruins the usability of the interface. Further, I don't consider right clicking on something to be all that un-obvious. We've been using context menus for almost 20 years now.
We're not talking about clueless people here. We're talking about slashdot users, and those in other forums for technical support. These are more advanced users, and those perfectly capable of digging around.
As I said in another post, this is not basic functionality, it's more advanced and there's nothing wrong with more advanced functionality needing to have some knowledge to utilize.