/// Graphically and gameplay wise, there is no line between home and arcade systems anymore. They've more than caught up to each other.///
Err, if that's the case why don't I have a home system that I can jump on, hop on to ride a motorcycle, sit in a cockpit, etc? All examples you cited after making that comment.
And Nintendo is making a gamble... since so many people will look at the controller and go "wtf?". It is a good thing, but still a gamble.
NASA has announced that in 2015 monkeys "may" fly out of Jeb Bush's butt and break the sound barrier in record time. Once this is done they "may" colonize space in what "may" be termed the "butt-monkey freedom station".
Semantics, maybe, but I also live in an area with no DSL/Cablemodem and we've got a GREAT wireless infrastructure via 2 802.11b based ISPs. One has a T1, the other a 3Mb ATM link.
Overall my uptime is almost as good as with DSL. I probably average 2-3 hours a month downtime due to various issues, only some of which are because I'm on wireless instead of wired.
Way back when I used to have a number of Cobalt RaQ/Qube servers running (primarily work related), a couple of Linux servers, router, multiple switches, this, that, the other thing.
I quit. It was pointless.
Now I get by quite happily on:
Linksys WRT54G wired/wireless router (yes, with the hacked firmware and a spare unit for backup)
An old Linux server that I rarely turn on anymore, mostly as an emergency "oops, I need to fdisk this drive" or "I need to offload these ISO images" and then turn it back off.
A dual opteron workstation (Sun W2100z) with enough RAM and disk space to work as my main gaming rig (which means windows.. if Linux gamed well I'd switch it back but it doesn't do I haven't) as well as a few concurrent VMWare Linux instances (for work and fun).
A relatively old linux laptop (P3-600 Thinkpad X20) running my home server. It is robust, does enough web/email/etc serving for 24/7 needs, has a battery for when the main UPS runs out, can go wireless for hacking in the living room, and in a pinch can go with me (but I don't do this much given I have static services on it).
A decent P4-2.4Ghz laptop that I take on the road with me. Gaming in a pinch. 1 drive has Win2K mostly because I didn't want to use WinXP on 512MB of RAM with an MMORPG. The other drive has various Linux partitions for working remotely.
A wireless/wired Squeezebox (networked audio player) in my living room.
Various wireless cards for guests.
Dual CAT-6 lines I ran to the living room during a remodel that are connected to my closet in the back. I don't use them yet, but figured it would help future-proof the house and once used them for hooking up my desktop out in the living room but decided it wasn't worth it.
Soon to be installed is a wired Vonage broadband VOIP adapter (purchased, not used yet, waiting for my number transfer papers to go through), keeping 1 landline for emergencies.
Outside of my house on the roof is a Linksys WET-11 for bridging my wireless internet connection.
The code is owned by Sun. Sun owns Java. Sun likes Java. This shouldn't surprise anyone.
The people complaining about this are looking a gift horse in the mouth. If you don't like the teeth, raise a new horse.
People create open source software in Java,.NET and other things all the time. What is next, there is going to be a geeksquad going out and attacking those projects as well?
RMS... if you don't like what Sun is doing and feel you could do it better, then start up the GNU Office project. Otherwise, forget it.
NOTE: I believe that Java -should- be open sourced, but that doesn't detract from the value of the gift that Sun has provided in Open Office.
Disclaimer: I work for Sun, but I have no control over software licensing and truthfully, don't want to.
On a macroscropic scale it is fairly simple to track overall patterns on a 10-25 year scale.
Far different processes. Do I think a few droughts or a few more hurricanes than normal matter much in the scheme of things? Nope. But consistent and constant changes in temperature, global wind patterns, etc, yes.
Or, in simpler terms, you're talking about weather, I'm talking about climate.
Yes - and you know what happens when scientists get to make policy decisions based on an emerging field?
You get a food pyramid that kills millions in an attempt to make them less fat (it actually makes them more fat!). Ask a heart surgeon - the FDA listening to early nutritional scientists directly led to the prevalence of heart attacks today.
Do you -honestly- believe that such a government sponsored group can truly be called "scientists"?
Or do you honestly believe that current food, health OR economic policies are allowed to produce true results without the skewing of said government?
Hell, it is the government over the last years that has ignored the science out there and allowed situations to continue.
Situations like... oh, say, corn subsidies that are used to make corn sweetener FAR cheaper alternative that beat and can sugar. Who cares if those corn sweeteners are a different kind of sugar the metabolizes differently, causing a dependence on the substance and a change in the way we store fats.
The above is offtopic for a reason. I'm sure you'll see it.
As for the CO2 War... hell, it wouldn't do us any good anyway. Why work on removing CO2 instead of -producing- less of it? "Clean Coal", remember that? What a crock. Better than the worst polluting fuel we have right now? Yes. Anywhere near what we should be working towards? No.
For example: Have every client connect to the main server to track stats. If a stat gets modified faster than it could be changed in game, then an alarm goes off.
Under that assumption you have to at least allow 20 hours if not 24 hours of change. Sorry, but given the rate of casual players this would still screw them. You could still advance your character (characters with multiple computers or program instances) as if you were playing all day every day. Not nearly as fast as an insta-cheat, but still far more than a regular "real" player can keep up with.
There is almost no way that a true P2P game would be able to prevent hacking, even with a background checking server (which wouldn't be true P2P anyway). We've already seen a few cases of P2P hashes being hacked without changing their sums recently.
A police system is going to be far more effective than the alternative, but then you have to deal with the question of "10 people flagged this account as cheating but 20 people flagged him as being ok". Its less of an issue in a multiplayer game like Halo 2 (it isn't "massive" and you don't care nearly as much if player A is cheating because he only affects players B through Z, not players B through ZZZZZZ).
There is another plausible idea... have the P2P network randomly change various binaries used in the game and force all clients to update to the new binaries to continue playing. The clients would have to download the binary -and- propogate it and each client would perform checks back to the server (perhaps even sharing it back to the server in random intervals) so that the server can confirm that not only is the hash the same, but the bits are not different. If the server finds altered binaries, it can force a traceback through the clients that that slice was shared from until it finds the "right" slice. The slice -after- that is the one causing the problems. Eventually the entire client would be refreshed and any impurities wiped out.
It wouldn't prevent cheating 100% of the time, but it would remove 100% of the cheats -over- time.
And if it gets used by a software company, consider this prior art.
And at no point since the rise of mammals has it changed in such abrupt and chaotic ways as it has the last 50-150 years.
Just like a computer may randomly crash after running for a long time, but will go down far more often when a human is using it.
Problem isn't just that we may kill ourselves. The problems is we may take a large chunk of everything else with us. However, the former problem should be bad enough.
I'm guessing you don't have and/or don't want children. I don't, but I do want them. I would like to not go to my grave (and possibly theirs or their grandchildrens) knowing that it was my generation that should have seen the mess and still didn't do everything we could to fix it.
We spent full percentages of the U.S.'s GNP to get to the moon. Surely we could spend a percentage of -that- to see about trying to fix the damage we've done and are doing.
Besides, if you don't mind if we all die, why should you mind if we try to fix what we've done and clean up our mess?
In other words, a manufacturer could in theory create a card from an open hardware spec and charge for it. The idea being that said hardware would have specifications fully available. Further I would assume the hardware designer would require modifications to be made available.
If you've dealt with various Linux binary-only drivers in the past few years you'd know what the coolness was.
Hell, the coolness extends to Windows, too, as hackers could then modify windows drivers or create their own.
Yeah, I know, you were lookin for the +4 Funny, but some folks are going to read it and take it seriously:P
Additionally, on said dual Opteron boxes, both with 2GB of memory, when booting Linux (RH9, Fedora Core 3, SuSE 9.1 and especially Ubuntu HH) I am out of the Windows "sluggish" period after login 30% faster than it takes me to get a full GNOME boot. Just tested it.
I work for and with a Linux distribution day-in and day-out.
I also run a Windows XP SP2 partition on the same type of box.
The boxes are dual Opteron, less than 6 months old and with a modern 3D video card.
I run into at least as many problems with Linux (let me rephrase... with 4 different modern flavors of Linux) as I do with Windows XP.
Window 95 through Me? Crap.
Windows NT4? Yes, had a LOT of bugginess but was more stable than previous windows.
Windows 2000? Pretty damned stable until you tried to run 3D games.
Windows XP? Stable. Period. Not something I would use for running a web server on but that has more to do with the lack of good software to do that with compared to Windows 2003 or Linux (all my servers run linux BUT not because of core OS problems... rather a] I switched to Linux for servers a decade ago when Windows was pure crap for anything but rebootable gaming and am therefore more familiar with sysadmin'ing a Linux box and b] I'm perfectly happy with the server offerings on Linux).
Do I use Outlook or IE? Hell no. But that's far different from acting like a fanboy about your system becoming unresponsive. If you've actually had experience with XP (I sort of doubt it but its possible) then either you were running on bad hardware, you had bad drivers, or you taxed the system more than necessary.
And last, before you say that Linux runs on smaller hardware, yep, but that still doesn't mean the OS is crap. Since the days of the 8086 we've had to deal with OSes outgrowing old hardware. The game manufacturers and productivity software companies have made the assumption that modern software needs modern hardware. Can you make do with less hardware for most functions, yep again, but that isn't an adequate comparison (I can make Win2K run just FINE on a P3-600 and probably smaller gear... but I'm not going to get Quake3 running well on it). Any Linux system that can handle a modern game with full speed will also run Windows XP just fine.
Other people can work on make a Linux distro boot faster (and this is a distro issue more than a kernel issue, meaning all distros will need to agree to make use of the new speedups... which won't happen... which means some distros will still "feel" older) whether it is by loading multiple services simultaneously, loading some services on demand or after the boot process, etc. It won't invalidate the work RH is doing now on GDM. In fact, such work is complimentary.
In other words, people can quit complaining. If GDM loads faster and the bottleneck to login becomes the (quite) slow loading of initial system services, maybe it will give more impetus to other folks to work on that part of the puzzle.
The problem of course is that if the non-free version gets good, others will simply fork.
"Of course"... one of the biggest assumptions around. And it almost always shows bias.
Besides, even if a GPL'ed project were to release later versions under a different license (and that is what you are talking about here... even GPL programs are copywritten, but they have a very different license than most software) and later the open source version was forked an improved chances are good that 9[0-9]% of the people interested in that software would still only hear about the commercial version. EVEN if the open source version were markedly better.
The reasons:
1) There isn't much incentive to aquire a piece of code and the author's time unless it has demonstrable fiscal value to do so.
2) If the company has seen the potential and aquired something like this then chances are good that they are either:... A) Marketing it significantly (and if properly, to the right audience)
or... B) Have a niche market or OEM-style market that is going to be specifically interested in either closed-source value adds, support, or something else that that market doesn't feel they can get from open source (meaning even IF a customer had heard of the open source project, they would still have a tendency to the closed).
3) Few projects are small enough that a single author owns all the code in it. Projects like Mozilla or Linux will never (never say never, but still) have true privately owned closed source forks (they may ADD things but the main code will still be out there and alive). Therefore the big projects people tend to think of are not applicable here.
4) Unless there is a giant clamor for it in the open source community, chances are only a handful (or fingerful in some cases) of people will be working on it. If the commercial venture has even middlin resources, they'll be able to out do or -redo- anything the open source version can....
Besides, a simple name change can do wonders for something like this... take the project, enhance it with commercial resources the original never had, change the name (Mosaic, Netscape... Mozilla, Netscape... Netscape, Iplanet/AOLServer) and go market it. If you're successful and have a good product, when your competition hears about the open source version they'll likely think the open source project was an imitation....
(NOTE: I work for a company who creates, contributes and distributes both open source and closed source projects with a tendency to the former... I am not anti-open source... far from it... but biased comments like the one at the beginning of this show an overly simplistic view of a very complex market and if open source is to thrive people need to understand the mechanics better).
"If you don't install our service packs and updates, we're not responsible for your computer's security."...
"I installed SP2 and my applications won't run."...
"But your computer is safe and secure!"
Seriously... this hasn't just been as of SP2... Microsoft has broken application compatibility before. For instance, when Outlook became well known as a method of executing malware, Microsoft's answer wasn't to actually fix it (until later) but to instead tell people to turn off the options that allowed it to do it at all.
And before the fanboys come yell at me:
1) I run XP on 1 box, 2K on a laptop. Yes, I -also- run Linux but I've been running and admin'ing Windows for longer and consistently.
2) I installed SP2 a few months ago. Overall it worked but it did break some programs I use (not Microsoft's middleware or Halo, either) and so I had to spend a day tweaking settings and downloading things that edited things like the tcpip.sys binary. NOT a good thing and still not fixed via MS hotfixed. That was for my personal box, imagine how much the XP admins out there are dreading having to do this for entire enterprises!
Seriously, if something like this happens, it is simply going to make more people say that people like Jonathan Schwartz and Bill Gates were right all along not just about the GPL (few people make distinctions about which version they are speaking of when it comes to the GPL) but also in regards to RMS.
I haven't written -much- under the GPL, but what I have I never intended to force the user to be required to distribute -any- change so long as they never polluted the world with bastardized... err... modified versions of my code. Yes, contributing back is nice, sure, but I know what the real world is like and I would much prefer people be able to use what I wrote than have to reinvent the wheel just because they were under restrictions not to redistribute the changes. So long as no one distributes their modifications under a closed license or binary-only form, I don't give a hoot how they use it internally, because I know that if the proposed changes were active MANY wouldn't be able to use it at all.
Instead of modifying the "GPL" for this purpose, create the sGPL (strict GPL). I'm sure it will be useful for people, but it inherently changes the GPL too much.
Slashdot Mirror
/// ///
... since so many people will look at the controller and go "wtf?". It is a good thing, but still a gamble.
Graphically and gameplay wise, there is no line between home and arcade systems anymore. They've more than caught up to each other.
Err, if that's the case why don't I have a home system that I can jump on, hop on to ride a motorcycle, sit in a cockpit, etc? All examples you cited after making that comment.
And Nintendo is making a gamble
There should be less "should be"s in the article before I take it too seriously.
Will the glitz happen? Should.
Will the current stuff be easy to port? Hah, not going there.
NASA has announced that in 2015 monkeys "may" fly out of Jeb Bush's butt and break the sound barrier in record time. Once this is done they "may" colonize space in what "may" be termed the "butt-monkey freedom station".
As long as you buy your ROMs (yeah right) it wouldn't be a big deal. Most hardware is built at cost or loss to turn you around for buying the games.
Emulation doesn't kill platforms, piracy does.
Your point being ... ?
/. for more than a week, you should have known that not every article is about innovation. Sometimes its just about "fun".
That's a lot of angst for a simple "hey, look at this interesting contraption" article.
If you have been visiting
Cellular == Wireless
Wireless != Cellular
Semantics, maybe, but I also live in an area with no DSL/Cablemodem and we've got a GREAT wireless infrastructure via 2 802.11b based ISPs. One has a T1, the other a 3Mb ATM link.
Overall my uptime is almost as good as with DSL. I probably average 2-3 hours a month downtime due to various issues, only some of which are because I'm on wireless instead of wired.
Putting his site in the main review is one thing. Posting in the replies is another. Why shouldn't he?
a) this sounds a lot like E3 has become the new Comdex
b) E3 in the late 90s (I used to go when I could) wasn't much better
w00p.
-good- 2.4GHz phones (a'la Siemens Gigasets) don't interfere with 802.11b/g/n/whatever.
And 5GHz phones have a tendency to not work as well (for me) through my house due to solid construction.
My microwave interferes with my phone, but neither interferes with my wireless.
Crappy 2.4GHz phones (a'la Panasonic) do, but that doesn't mean they all do.
and how long ago was Prey announced? Wasn't this the Quake (1 or 2, I forget) killer from long ago?
Ouch ... then count me in ... 15 or more unused RaQ / Qube stuff ... yeah ... I kept meaning to sell it.
Way back when I used to have a number of Cobalt RaQ/Qube servers running (primarily work related), a couple of Linux servers, router, multiple switches, this, that, the other thing.
.. if Linux gamed well I'd switch it back but it doesn't do I haven't) as well as a few concurrent VMWare Linux instances (for work and fun).
I quit. It was pointless.
Now I get by quite happily on:
Linksys WRT54G wired/wireless router (yes, with the hacked firmware and a spare unit for backup)
An old Linux server that I rarely turn on anymore, mostly as an emergency "oops, I need to fdisk this drive" or "I need to offload these ISO images" and then turn it back off.
A dual opteron workstation (Sun W2100z) with enough RAM and disk space to work as my main gaming rig (which means windows
A relatively old linux laptop (P3-600 Thinkpad X20) running my home server. It is robust, does enough web/email/etc serving for 24/7 needs, has a battery for when the main UPS runs out, can go wireless for hacking in the living room, and in a pinch can go with me (but I don't do this much given I have static services on it).
A decent P4-2.4Ghz laptop that I take on the road with me. Gaming in a pinch. 1 drive has Win2K mostly because I didn't want to use WinXP on 512MB of RAM with an MMORPG. The other drive has various Linux partitions for working remotely.
A wireless/wired Squeezebox (networked audio player) in my living room.
Various wireless cards for guests.
Dual CAT-6 lines I ran to the living room during a remodel that are connected to my closet in the back. I don't use them yet, but figured it would help future-proof the house and once used them for hooking up my desktop out in the living room but decided it wasn't worth it.
Soon to be installed is a wired Vonage broadband VOIP adapter (purchased, not used yet, waiting for my number transfer papers to go through), keeping 1 landline for emergencies.
Outside of my house on the roof is a Linksys WET-11 for bridging my wireless internet connection.
And that is after cutting down!
The code is owned by Sun. Sun owns Java. Sun likes Java. This shouldn't surprise anyone.
.NET and other things all the time. What is next, there is going to be a geeksquad going out and attacking those projects as well?
... if you don't like what Sun is doing and feel you could do it better, then start up the GNU Office project. Otherwise, forget it.
The people complaining about this are looking a gift horse in the mouth. If you don't like the teeth, raise a new horse.
People create open source software in Java,
RMS
NOTE: I believe that Java -should- be open sourced, but that doesn't detract from the value of the gift that Sun has provided in Open Office.
Disclaimer: I work for Sun, but I have no control over software licensing and truthfully, don't want to.
On a microscopic scale, yes.
On a macroscropic scale it is fairly simple to track overall patterns on a 10-25 year scale.
Far different processes. Do I think a few droughts or a few more hurricanes than normal matter much in the scheme of things? Nope. But consistent and constant changes in temperature, global wind patterns, etc, yes.
Or, in simpler terms, you're talking about weather, I'm talking about climate.
You get a food pyramid that kills millions in an attempt to make them less fat (it actually makes them more fat!). Ask a heart surgeon - the FDA listening to early nutritional scientists directly led to the prevalence of heart attacks today.
Do you -honestly- believe that such a government sponsored group can truly be called "scientists"?
Or do you honestly believe that current food, health OR economic policies are allowed to produce true results without the skewing of said government?
Hell, it is the government over the last years that has ignored the science out there and allowed situations to continue.
Situations like
The above is offtopic for a reason. I'm sure you'll see it.
As for the CO2 War
For example: Have every client connect to the main server to track stats. If a stat gets modified faster than it could be changed in game, then an alarm goes off.
Under that assumption you have to at least allow 20 hours if not 24 hours of change. Sorry, but given the rate of casual players this would still screw them. You could still advance your character (characters with multiple computers or program instances) as if you were playing all day every day. Not nearly as fast as an insta-cheat, but still far more than a regular "real" player can keep up with.
There is almost no way that a true P2P game would be able to prevent hacking, even with a background checking server (which wouldn't be true P2P anyway). We've already seen a few cases of P2P hashes being hacked without changing their sums recently.
A police system is going to be far more effective than the alternative, but then you have to deal with the question of "10 people flagged this account as cheating but 20 people flagged him as being ok". Its less of an issue in a multiplayer game like Halo 2 (it isn't "massive" and you don't care nearly as much if player A is cheating because he only affects players B through Z, not players B through ZZZZZZ).
There is another plausible idea
It wouldn't prevent cheating 100% of the time, but it would remove 100% of the cheats -over- time.
And if it gets used by a software company, consider this prior art.
And at no point since the rise of mammals has it changed in such abrupt and chaotic ways as it has the last 50-150 years.
Just like a computer may randomly crash after running for a long time, but will go down far more often when a human is using it.
Problem isn't just that we may kill ourselves. The problems is we may take a large chunk of everything else with us. However, the former problem should be bad enough.
I'm guessing you don't have and/or don't want children. I don't, but I do want them. I would like to not go to my grave (and possibly theirs or their grandchildrens) knowing that it was my generation that should have seen the mess and still didn't do everything we could to fix it.
We spent full percentages of the U.S.'s GNP to get to the moon. Surely we could spend a percentage of -that- to see about trying to fix the damage we've done and are doing.
Besides, if you don't mind if we all die, why should you mind if we try to fix what we've done and clean up our mess?
Open != Free
:P
Free != Open
GPL == (Open && Free)
Open Hardware == Open
Open Hardware != Free
In other words, a manufacturer could in theory create a card from an open hardware spec and charge for it. The idea being that said hardware would have specifications fully available. Further I would assume the hardware designer would require modifications to be made available.
If you've dealt with various Linux binary-only drivers in the past few years you'd know what the coolness was.
Hell, the coolness extends to Windows, too, as hackers could then modify windows drivers or create their own.
Yeah, I know, you were lookin for the +4 Funny, but some folks are going to read it and take it seriously
It was because you made a blanket statement.
Additionally, on said dual Opteron boxes, both with 2GB of memory, when booting Linux (RH9, Fedora Core 3, SuSE 9.1 and especially Ubuntu HH) I am out of the Windows "sluggish" period after login 30% faster than it takes me to get a full GNOME boot. Just tested it.
typo, meant Doom3 ... brainfarts happen.
re: 2)
... with 4 different modern flavors of Linux) as I do with Windows XP.
... rather a] I switched to Linux for servers a decade ago when Windows was pure crap for anything but rebootable gaming and am therefore more familiar with sysadmin'ing a Linux box and b] I'm perfectly happy with the server offerings on Linux).
... but I'm not going to get Quake3 running well on it). Any Linux system that can handle a modern game with full speed will also run Windows XP just fine.
I work for and with a Linux distribution day-in and day-out.
I also run a Windows XP SP2 partition on the same type of box.
The boxes are dual Opteron, less than 6 months old and with a modern 3D video card.
I run into at least as many problems with Linux (let me rephrase
Window 95 through Me? Crap.
Windows NT4? Yes, had a LOT of bugginess but was more stable than previous windows.
Windows 2000? Pretty damned stable until you tried to run 3D games.
Windows XP? Stable. Period. Not something I would use for running a web server on but that has more to do with the lack of good software to do that with compared to Windows 2003 or Linux (all my servers run linux BUT not because of core OS problems
Do I use Outlook or IE? Hell no. But that's far different from acting like a fanboy about your system becoming unresponsive. If you've actually had experience with XP (I sort of doubt it but its possible) then either you were running on bad hardware, you had bad drivers, or you taxed the system more than necessary.
And last, before you say that Linux runs on smaller hardware, yep, but that still doesn't mean the OS is crap. Since the days of the 8086 we've had to deal with OSes outgrowing old hardware. The game manufacturers and productivity software companies have made the assumption that modern software needs modern hardware. Can you make do with less hardware for most functions, yep again, but that isn't an adequate comparison (I can make Win2K run just FINE on a P3-600 and probably smaller gear
Re: 3) See re: 2)
Corollary to your first point ...
... which won't happen ... which means some distros will still "feel" older) whether it is by loading multiple services simultaneously, loading some services on demand or after the boot process, etc. It won't invalidate the work RH is doing now on GDM. In fact, such work is complimentary.
Other people can work on make a Linux distro boot faster (and this is a distro issue more than a kernel issue, meaning all distros will need to agree to make use of the new speedups
In other words, people can quit complaining. If GDM loads faster and the bottleneck to login becomes the (quite) slow loading of initial system services, maybe it will give more impetus to other folks to work on that part of the puzzle.
The problem of course is that if the non-free version gets good, others will simply fork.
... one of the biggest assumptions around. And it almost always shows bias.
... even GPL programs are copywritten, but they have a very different license than most software) and later the open source version was forked an improved chances are good that 9[0-9]% of the people interested in that software would still only hear about the commercial version. EVEN if the open source version were markedly better.
... A) Marketing it significantly (and if properly, to the right audience)
... B) Have a niche market or OEM-style market that is going to be specifically interested in either closed-source value adds, support, or something else that that market doesn't feel they can get from open source (meaning even IF a customer had heard of the open source project, they would still have a tendency to the closed).
...
... take the project, enhance it with commercial resources the original never had, change the name (Mosaic, Netscape ... Mozilla, Netscape ... Netscape, Iplanet/AOLServer) and go market it. If you're successful and have a good product, when your competition hears about the open source version they'll likely think the open source project was an imitation. ...
... I am not anti-open source ... far from it ... but biased comments like the one at the beginning of this show an overly simplistic view of a very complex market and if open source is to thrive people need to understand the mechanics better).
"Of course"
Besides, even if a GPL'ed project were to release later versions under a different license (and that is what you are talking about here
The reasons:
1) There isn't much incentive to aquire a piece of code and the author's time unless it has demonstrable fiscal value to do so.
2) If the company has seen the potential and aquired something like this then chances are good that they are either:
or
3) Few projects are small enough that a single author owns all the code in it. Projects like Mozilla or Linux will never (never say never, but still) have true privately owned closed source forks (they may ADD things but the main code will still be out there and alive). Therefore the big projects people tend to think of are not applicable here.
4) Unless there is a giant clamor for it in the open source community, chances are only a handful (or fingerful in some cases) of people will be working on it. If the commercial venture has even middlin resources, they'll be able to out do or -redo- anything the open source version can.
Besides, a simple name change can do wonders for something like this
(NOTE: I work for a company who creates, contributes and distributes both open source and closed source projects with a tendency to the former
"If you don't install our service packs and updates, we're not responsible for your computer's security." ...
...
... this hasn't just been as of SP2 ... Microsoft has broken application compatibility before. For instance, when Outlook became well known as a method of executing malware, Microsoft's answer wasn't to actually fix it (until later) but to instead tell people to turn off the options that allowed it to do it at all.
"I installed SP2 and my applications won't run."
"But your computer is safe and secure!"
Seriously
And before the fanboys come yell at me:
1) I run XP on 1 box, 2K on a laptop. Yes, I -also- run Linux but I've been running and admin'ing Windows for longer and consistently.
2) I installed SP2 a few months ago. Overall it worked but it did break some programs I use (not Microsoft's middleware or Halo, either) and so I had to spend a day tweaking settings and downloading things that edited things like the tcpip.sys binary. NOT a good thing and still not fixed via MS hotfixed. That was for my personal box, imagine how much the XP admins out there are dreading having to do this for entire enterprises!
Yeah, because no one opens source code under licenses other than the GPL.
... err ... modified versions of my code. Yes, contributing back is nice, sure, but I know what the real world is like and I would much prefer people be able to use what I wrote than have to reinvent the wheel just because they were under restrictions not to redistribute the changes. So long as no one distributes their modifications under a closed license or binary-only form, I don't give a hoot how they use it internally, because I know that if the proposed changes were active MANY wouldn't be able to use it at all.
Seriously, if something like this happens, it is simply going to make more people say that people like Jonathan Schwartz and Bill Gates were right all along not just about the GPL (few people make distinctions about which version they are speaking of when it comes to the GPL) but also in regards to RMS.
I haven't written -much- under the GPL, but what I have I never intended to force the user to be required to distribute -any- change so long as they never polluted the world with bastardized
Instead of modifying the "GPL" for this purpose, create the sGPL (strict GPL). I'm sure it will be useful for people, but it inherently changes the GPL too much.