You are correct. They didn't accidentally infringe the GPL. In fact, they didn't infringe the GPL at all.
The issue, according to Microsoft and Vyatta was that Microsofts binary driver exported symbols which claimed to only be used by GPL'd code, which basically doesn't make any sense for a binary driver to do.
Apparently, Microsoft could have marked the exports correctly and this would have solved the problem, but instead chose to GPL their code which also solved the problem.
Microsoft didn't release the code by choice. They released it after somebody figured out that they were violating the terms of the GPL, and made what essentially amounted to legal threats.
How is someone saying "Hey, I think you're violating the gpl" a legal threat? I don't believe the person that discovered the issue was the author of the code, so would not have any legal standing to make a legal threat. But even if he was, Microsoft's response was "Oh, you're right... here, let me fix that".
I disagree. The "forks" from original BSD weren't really forks. They were Berkeley giving up on it and letting others take over.
Most of the various BSD's are "forks" because they have different purposes. OpenBSD is security oriented, NetBSD is intended to run on vritually everything that has a CPU, FreeBSD was intended for more mainstram use.
The only real "schism" I can think of is when Matt Dillon broke off and formed DragonFly BSD. Everything else was pretty much some guys saying "I'm gonna go off and do this instead".
There may not be any real Linux "forks", but that's because Linus has tried very hard to make Linux "one size fits all", and that has resulted in its own set of problems (see the various scheduler wars, for instance.. they were bloody). There are also any number of "branches" in which different patches are applied to the mainline kernel for different purposes.
That's PRECISELY what happened. Microsoft "shut down" by delivering the only thing they could do in the timeframe, a non-working version of Windows without IE.
The EU has not dictated MS do *ANYTHING* yet. But Microsoft has to finalized Windows 7 and can't wait for the EU to get their head out of their ass and make a decision.
Is Microsoft supposed to read the EU's mind? Look into the future and find out what the ruling is?
Which browsers must they ship? What if they get it wrong? It's just easier to ship without a browser at all, rather than wait for the EU to get around to deciding exactly what MS should do.
Actually, I wouldn't call it a pre-emptive strike. The fact of the matter is, Microosft can't wait for the EU to make a decision. They have a product ready to ship. They seemed to have decided that rather than risk further issues, they'll just remove IE for the EU so that they can ship the OS on time.
The problem was, you could still access the internet via explorer, just by typing a URL in any windows explorer window. Further, deleting iexplore.exe means you couldn't get updates. I'd call that a big repercussion.
The point was not that Microsoft couldn't create a version of Windows without a browser, obviously they could. They couldn't simply remove it instantly without basically creating a system that was non-functional.
The judge gave them 30 days to remove IE. Not enough time to re-engineer the OS without the browser in a way that wouldn't break things.
You're still missing the point. No, standards don't force anyone to do anything, but you can at least say "You're not conforming to the standard".
And as I said, yes, you can weasel word your way around any standard, but that's not what Microsoft is doing.
The only reason that so many apps that use ODF are interoperable is because they all chose to reverse engineer the way OOo did it, or they used OOo's code. That's called a de-facto standard, which is what.doc and.xls are. de-facto standards are not good.
You are conflating "more compatible" with "more conformant".
There is no standard sepcification for formulas to be "conformant" to. Yes, the CleverAge plug-in was more interoperable with OOo impelementation than SP2 is, but because the impelemantion of such things is not defined by the standaard, both are equally "conformant".
If you were a programmer, you'd understand. Spend some time on the C++ std newsgroups, and when someone mentions some "undefined" behavior, you get blasted that "undefined can do anything, including delete all your files or blow up the computer".
No, SP2 is not interoperable with OOo, but you don't have to be to be ODF 1.1 compliant. Is MS being a dick about it? Probably, but they're more making a point, I think. A point that ODF propoents know is true, and embarassing to them, so they react with name calling and vitriol.
The point was that ODF was not the better standard. It might, eventually, be... but the lack of interoperability guaranteed by the standard is ridiculous.
Yes, as Rob Weir points out, anyone can weasel word a standard, but MS isn't weasel wording. There are literally giant mac-truck sized holes in the standard.
It fully respects 8.3 (if you actually read 8.3, you'd know that). 8.1 is poorly written, and suggests "examples" of how a formula might look. Hardly mandatory.
Ok, so it turns out they can't even get their criticism right. The *actual* section that mentions brackets is 8.1.3, not 8.3.1 (which the document references).
8.1.3 talks about "examples", and is not written in a way to suggest mandatory behavior. For example, it starts out like this:
"Typically, the formula itself begins with an equal (=) sign and can include the following components:"
This is vague, and seems to say that formulas can be anything, but this might be a good way to do it.
And under a bullet point of the "typical" things is this:
"Addresses of cells that contain numbers. The addresses can be relative or absolute, see section 8.3.1. Addresses in formulas start with a âoe[âoe and end with a âoe]â. See sections 8.3.1 and 8.3.1 for information about how to address a cell or cell range."
So an aside, of an exmaple, of "typical" formulas which may or may not be present says addresses have to be bracketed in formulas.
Oh, yeah.. that's *SO* violating the standard.
Please. At most, it's a nit pick. At best, it's a VERY poorly written specification.
Yes. I've read it before. Other than one part that is false, the rest is hand waving.
It basically says "Yeah, we know the standard doesn't specify so much stuff that the only way to be compatible is to get people to agree on how to do things.."
That's not "interoperability", that's "praying" everyone manages to make it work.
The part about section 8.3.1 is completely bogus. Read the specification yourself. 8.3.1 says nothing about requiring brackets.
"To reference table cells so called cell addresses are used. The structure of a cell address is as follows:
1.The name of the table.
2.A dot (.).
3.An alphabetic value representing the column. The letter A represents column 1, B represents column 2, and so on. AA represents column 27, AB represents column 28, and so on.
4.A numeric value representing the row. The number 1 represents the first row, the number 2 represents the second row, and so on."
1) You can make the ribbon go away by a single mouse click or hotkey.
2) No, it changes based on what you are ACTUALLY doing. If you click on an image, it gives you image editing tools. If you click in a table, it gives you table tools. It's context, not telepathy.
3) Microsoft has learned (the hard way) that if you give people the option to go back to the old, they will never learn the new. Thus you are stuck supporting the old for life. The only way is a clean break.
I should have read your link first, so my figures are wrong.
However, having read the link, I'm baffled by such claims as "On average, all users who responded estimated that the Ribbon has reduced their productivity."
"on average" and "all users" do not belong in the same sentence. WTF?
That sounds like someone trying to use statistics and weasel words to say something the statistics don't actually say.
Still the survey's numbers look good, but don't really make a lot of sense because of the way they're presented. What's more, users with negative opinions are far more likely to take such a survey than those who simply have no strong opinion one way or the other. So that market is largely unknown.
Wait, a survey that uses percentages estimated by the surveyed? Wow, that's not only inaccurate, it's inaccurately inaccurate. Everyone with a bone to pick will more than likely grossly over-estimate their inconvenience.
Still, the numbers say that 64% of advanced and 71% of intermediate users either have no opinion or like the ribbon. That seems like an overall win to me. I note you don't include novices, which given the trend sould be as high as 85 or 90% who like or have no opinion of it.
Since you can't please all of the people, an average of 75% seems like a homerun to me.
I'm kind of curious. What makes Microsoft's version of ODF any worse than anyone elses? Or for that matter, what makes OOo's any better? Just because OOo's non-standard spreadsheet formula is used more commonly doesn't make it better.
Until ODF 1.2 is out, it's just a bunch of he-said-she-said.
Apparently not enough to know that there's no such thing as C# 3.5. There's C# 3.0, and.NET 3.5, but no C# 3.5. Even a casual familiarity with the technogies would make you aware of that.
Why don't you ask Apple if you can give MacOSX away for free. Or if they will give you the entire source code for it, so you can share that as well?
You are mistaken, again. Centos is not a copy of the entire RHEL. RHEL includes proprietary programs that are not part of Centos. Further, Red Hat does not offer a free binary version, they only off the source code which you can build yourself if you're so inclined (which is what Centos did).
So, while more of RHEL is open source than OSX is, it's still the same basic premise, they give you the open stuff, which you have to build yourself, and prevent you from using the proprietary stuff.
Red Hat does not offer a "free" version of RHEL, though Centos is essentially the same thing. That doesn't change the fact that Red hat is charging massive amounts of money for what is free of cost from others.
Likewise, There are free distributions of apples core OS as well (not the GUI and many of the libraries, but the OS itself is free). It's called Darwin.
In both cases, Apple and Red Hat add value and sell a product without offering a free version. One is GPL, one is BSD.
You were the one that claimed that *BSD's weren't free software. That's not "nit picking". The FSF would violently disagree that the difference is nit picking. I said your entire belief system was a lie because you have this mistaken belief that only GPL software is free software. That is entirely wrong, and the basis for most of your misunderstanding.
That article only talks about Microsoft copying the interface, not using Apple's source code. Interfaces can be copied by simply looking at them, and Microsoft did have advanced access to them.
Basically, Microsoft did to Apple what KDE did to Microsoft and Apple.
Also, no.. Microsoft did not pay Apple for coyright infringement, they paid them for Patent cross licensing. There is "rumor" that there was a payment for copyright infringement, but the rumor is that this was for Quicktime related code, so that doesn't really back up your argument.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct. They didn't accidentally infringe the GPL. In fact, they didn't infringe the GPL at all.
The issue, according to Microsoft and Vyatta was that Microsofts binary driver exported symbols which claimed to only be used by GPL'd code, which basically doesn't make any sense for a binary driver to do.
Apparently, Microsoft could have marked the exports correctly and this would have solved the problem, but instead chose to GPL their code which also solved the problem.
Microsoft didn't release the code by choice. They released it after somebody figured out that they were violating the terms of the GPL, and made what essentially amounted to legal threats.
How is someone saying "Hey, I think you're violating the gpl" a legal threat? I don't believe the person that discovered the issue was the author of the code, so would not have any legal standing to make a legal threat. But even if he was, Microsoft's response was "Oh, you're right... here, let me fix that".
I disagree. The "forks" from original BSD weren't really forks. They were Berkeley giving up on it and letting others take over.
Most of the various BSD's are "forks" because they have different purposes. OpenBSD is security oriented, NetBSD is intended to run on vritually everything that has a CPU, FreeBSD was intended for more mainstram use.
The only real "schism" I can think of is when Matt Dillon broke off and formed DragonFly BSD. Everything else was pretty much some guys saying "I'm gonna go off and do this instead".
There may not be any real Linux "forks", but that's because Linus has tried very hard to make Linux "one size fits all", and that has resulted in its own set of problems (see the various scheduler wars, for instance.. they were bloody). There are also any number of "branches" in which different patches are applied to the mainline kernel for different purposes.
They have these things called CD's, and flash disks... you can buy them in stores.
You don't seem to be paying much attention.
That's PRECISELY what happened. Microsoft "shut down" by delivering the only thing they could do in the timeframe, a non-working version of Windows without IE.
You didn't think your argument through, did you?
You're not getting it.
The EU has not dictated MS do *ANYTHING* yet. But Microsoft has to finalized Windows 7 and can't wait for the EU to get their head out of their ass and make a decision.
Is Microsoft supposed to read the EU's mind? Look into the future and find out what the ruling is?
Which browsers must they ship? What if they get it wrong? It's just easier to ship without a browser at all, rather than wait for the EU to get around to deciding exactly what MS should do.
You really haven't been paying attention, have you?
Vista doesn't use IE for updates. It has a stand-alone application. Windows 7 is the same way.
Actually, I wouldn't call it a pre-emptive strike. The fact of the matter is, Microosft can't wait for the EU to make a decision. They have a product ready to ship. They seemed to have decided that rather than risk further issues, they'll just remove IE for the EU so that they can ship the OS on time.
The problem was, you could still access the internet via explorer, just by typing a URL in any windows explorer window. Further, deleting iexplore.exe means you couldn't get updates. I'd call that a big repercussion.
The point was not that Microsoft couldn't create a version of Windows without a browser, obviously they could. They couldn't simply remove it instantly without basically creating a system that was non-functional.
The judge gave them 30 days to remove IE. Not enough time to re-engineer the OS without the browser in a way that wouldn't break things.
You're still missing the point. No, standards don't force anyone to do anything, but you can at least say "You're not conforming to the standard".
And as I said, yes, you can weasel word your way around any standard, but that's not what Microsoft is doing.
The only reason that so many apps that use ODF are interoperable is because they all chose to reverse engineer the way OOo did it, or they used OOo's code. That's called a de-facto standard, which is what .doc and .xls are. de-facto standards are not good.
You are conflating "more compatible" with "more conformant".
There is no standard sepcification for formulas to be "conformant" to. Yes, the CleverAge plug-in was more interoperable with OOo impelementation than SP2 is, but because the impelemantion of such things is not defined by the standaard, both are equally "conformant".
If you were a programmer, you'd understand. Spend some time on the C++ std newsgroups, and when someone mentions some "undefined" behavior, you get blasted that "undefined can do anything, including delete all your files or blow up the computer".
No, SP2 is not interoperable with OOo, but you don't have to be to be ODF 1.1 compliant. Is MS being a dick about it? Probably, but they're more making a point, I think. A point that ODF propoents know is true, and embarassing to them, so they react with name calling and vitriol.
The point was that ODF was not the better standard. It might, eventually, be... but the lack of interoperability guaranteed by the standard is ridiculous.
Yes, as Rob Weir points out, anyone can weasel word a standard, but MS isn't weasel wording. There are literally giant mac-truck sized holes in the standard.
It fully respects 8.3 (if you actually read 8.3, you'd know that). 8.1 is poorly written, and suggests "examples" of how a formula might look. Hardly mandatory.
Ok, so it turns out they can't even get their criticism right. The *actual* section that mentions brackets is 8.1.3, not 8.3.1 (which the document references).
8.1.3 talks about "examples", and is not written in a way to suggest mandatory behavior. For example, it starts out like this:
"Typically, the formula itself begins with an equal (=) sign and can include the following components:"
This is vague, and seems to say that formulas can be anything, but this might be a good way to do it.
And under a bullet point of the "typical" things is this:
"Addresses of cells that contain numbers. The addresses can be relative or absolute, see section 8.3.1. Addresses in formulas start with a âoe[âoe and end with a âoe]â. See sections 8.3.1 and 8.3.1 for information about how to address a cell or cell range."
So an aside, of an exmaple, of "typical" formulas which may or may not be present says addresses have to be bracketed in formulas.
Oh, yeah.. that's *SO* violating the standard.
Please. At most, it's a nit pick. At best, it's a VERY poorly written specification.
Yes. I've read it before. Other than one part that is false, the rest is hand waving.
It basically says "Yeah, we know the standard doesn't specify so much stuff that the only way to be compatible is to get people to agree on how to do things.."
That's not "interoperability", that's "praying" everyone manages to make it work.
The part about section 8.3.1 is completely bogus. Read the specification yourself. 8.3.1 says nothing about requiring brackets.
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1-html/OpenDocument-v1.1.html#8.3.1.Referencing%20Table%20Cells|outline
It says:
"To reference table cells so called cell addresses are used. The structure of a cell address is as follows:
1.The name of the table.
2.A dot (.).
3.An alphabetic value representing the column. The letter A represents column 1, B represents column 2, and so on. AA represents column 27, AB represents column 28, and so on.
4.A numeric value representing the row. The number 1 represents the first row, the number 2 represents the second row, and so on."
Nothing there about brackets.
1) You can make the ribbon go away by a single mouse click or hotkey.
2) No, it changes based on what you are ACTUALLY doing. If you click on an image, it gives you image editing tools. If you click in a table, it gives you table tools. It's context, not telepathy.
3) Microsoft has learned (the hard way) that if you give people the option to go back to the old, they will never learn the new. Thus you are stuck supporting the old for life. The only way is a clean break.
I should have read your link first, so my figures are wrong.
However, having read the link, I'm baffled by such claims as "On average, all users who responded estimated that the Ribbon has reduced their productivity."
"on average" and "all users" do not belong in the same sentence. WTF?
That sounds like someone trying to use statistics and weasel words to say something the statistics don't actually say.
Still the survey's numbers look good, but don't really make a lot of sense because of the way they're presented. What's more, users with negative opinions are far more likely to take such a survey than those who simply have no strong opinion one way or the other. So that market is largely unknown.
Wait, a survey that uses percentages estimated by the surveyed? Wow, that's not only inaccurate, it's inaccurately inaccurate. Everyone with a bone to pick will more than likely grossly over-estimate their inconvenience.
Still, the numbers say that 64% of advanced and 71% of intermediate users either have no opinion or like the ribbon. That seems like an overall win to me. I note you don't include novices, which given the trend sould be as high as 85 or 90% who like or have no opinion of it.
Since you can't please all of the people, an average of 75% seems like a homerun to me.
I'm kind of curious. What makes Microsoft's version of ODF any worse than anyone elses? Or for that matter, what makes OOo's any better? Just because OOo's non-standard spreadsheet formula is used more commonly doesn't make it better.
Until ODF 1.2 is out, it's just a bunch of he-said-she-said.
Umm.. what? That comes as a suprise to my copies of the ECMA 335 and ISO 23270, both of which claim to be C# standards.
No, LINQ has not been added to these standards yet (they're in the process of doing that for C# 4) but C# is certainly both an ECMA and ISO standard.
Well, I wrote a fair amount code in C# 3.5
Apparently not enough to know that there's no such thing as C# 3.5. There's C# 3.0, and .NET 3.5, but no C# 3.5. Even a casual familiarity with the technogies would make you aware of that.
Why don't you ask Apple if you can give MacOSX away for free. Or if they will give you the entire source code for it, so you can share that as well?
You are mistaken, again. Centos is not a copy of the entire RHEL. RHEL includes proprietary programs that are not part of Centos. Further, Red Hat does not offer a free binary version, they only off the source code which you can build yourself if you're so inclined (which is what Centos did).
So, while more of RHEL is open source than OSX is, it's still the same basic premise, they give you the open stuff, which you have to build yourself, and prevent you from using the proprietary stuff.
Unless of course you start in the middle and expand outwards in both directions ;)
Yes, you can. But let's just assume you're correct. There are other options also.
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
This is, by definition, designed to run win32 applications from a CD.
To me when I see Mac OS X, it doesn't feel all that "free" to me, especially since it costs like $130 bucks.
How do you feel when you see Red Hat Enterprise Linux which costs as much as $18,000?
https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/
Red Hat does not offer a "free" version of RHEL, though Centos is essentially the same thing. That doesn't change the fact that Red hat is charging massive amounts of money for what is free of cost from others.
Likewise, There are free distributions of apples core OS as well (not the GUI and many of the libraries, but the OS itself is free). It's called Darwin.
In both cases, Apple and Red Hat add value and sell a product without offering a free version. One is GPL, one is BSD.
You were the one that claimed that *BSD's weren't free software. That's not "nit picking". The FSF would violently disagree that the difference is nit picking. I said your entire belief system was a lie because you have this mistaken belief that only GPL software is free software. That is entirely wrong, and the basis for most of your misunderstanding.
That article only talks about Microsoft copying the interface, not using Apple's source code. Interfaces can be copied by simply looking at them, and Microsoft did have advanced access to them.
Basically, Microsoft did to Apple what KDE did to Microsoft and Apple.
Also, no.. Microsoft did not pay Apple for coyright infringement, they paid them for Patent cross licensing. There is "rumor" that there was a payment for copyright infringement, but the rumor is that this was for Quicktime related code, so that doesn't really back up your argument.