I doubt Transmeta's IP is worth anywhere near that. Other people know quite well how to build fast low-power processors or how to create processors with adaptable instruction sets. Besides, the x86 architecture will be getting less and less important over the upcoming years.
I'm sure this kind of thing happens quite a bit, and it is neither funny, nor interesting.
The USPS is an organization staffed with real people, with a limited budget, and with a legal mandate to try to deliver mail. If people do these kinds of things, their costs go up and other mail delivery suffers. And a number of poor people have to deal with your smelly cheese or risk injuring themselves on your poorly packaged item.
People here would complain loudly if a 10M file clogged up their mail queue. It seems much worse to impose these kinds of physical hazards on real postal workers.
Squeak Smalltalk runs on WinCE devices, and it has an approach to programming more similar to what you might find on the Newton. Maybe it could fill a similar niche?
The Newton and the Palm are two different classes of devices because of their different sizes, prices, and weights, and I doubt they would be competing much. The Newton would, however, be significant competition to WinCE machines.
It works fine for what it was originally intended: simple calendaring, address book, and short notes. The problem is that it is now being presented as a "platform" for complex custom applications, and that it isn't very good for.
If they want to produce this kind of stuff and fill the landfills with more electronic junk, that's one thing.
But think about the patents (look for "Altschul" on delphion.com). The patents aren't on any technology to make the phone particularly cheap or light or easy to manufacture. They are on the notion of a disposable phone itself, and a phone that only works for a limited amount of time. Where is the invention there?
Since the article raises the issue of "women inventors", what this demonstrates to me is merely that women can be just as greedy as men. For women who are smart technologists, we have to look elsewhere. Fortunately, they are around.
ksh was a nice enhancement, but it was proprietary for too long, and I think there is little reason to prefer it over bash now. For heavy-duty scripting, ksh may still be slightly better than bash now, but for those applications there are better alternatives: Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, etc. In fact, for a while, ksh was trying to go for the scripting space that Tcl/Tk was in (including dynamic loading and widgets), and in that area, it was never competitive with Tcl/Tk.
Well, this shouldn't be surprising. Why do people believe VCs become VCs? With some exceptions, not out of love of technology or technology. VC funding has become a vehicle for making lots of money fast. In the boom times, that merely took hyping up bogus ideas in order to drive the stock up, and getting people to work for little more than a lottery ticket. Now that that isn't working anymore, many of them will pursue any legal and other trick they can think of
to limit the losses from their ill-advised investments.
Mr. Whetherell tells us so himself: He warned the company would defend its patent rights "if necessary . . . to the letter of the law.", which tells us that questions of ethical behavior or technological innovation presumably don't matter as long as there is still a legal loophole to be pursued.
The greed that has surrounded the whole VC industry over the last few years has caused people to lose fortunes, stalled important research by drawing away good people, discouraged long-term investment in research by stable companies, and made it nearly impossible to share and build on each other's research results, both in computer science and in biotechnology.
What can you do about it? There are some ideas that probably do need to get funded in a VC environment, and there are some far-out ideas that probably are well suited to that kind of funding. But for the most part, it's probably better not to do business with VCs, not to solicit funding from them, and not to work for startups. Not much good can come of companies that are fueled mostly by greed and irrational expectations. If you have a good idea, you can almost certainly find many other ways of financing it and building a business around it.
Apart from the content, what I find highly disturbing is the quality of the reporting itself:
AltaVista, the internet search engine, is threatening to issue lawsuits to force companies using search techniques for which it owns the patent to pay it copyright.
You don't "pay copyrights" for patents. In fact, patents have nothing to do with copyrights, not in the US and not in Britain.
If the Financial Times "legal correspondent" can't keep the difference between patents and copyrights straight, how accurate can the rest of the reporting be?
I can't tell whether you are serious or whether you are joking.
Actually, most of the great works of music were produced with little or no copyright protection at all. I'd be perfectly satisfied if all future generations of US musicians were such slackers as Mozart, Bach, or Handel.
Instead, our tough copyright laws give us such ``quality'' as Madonna, Britney Spears, and the Jacksons. The good, less popular stuff merely falls by the wayside and disappears from circulation, since it is locked up by the same copyright laws that those packaged products demand. That seems like a lose-lose deal to me.
If one of the main requirements is that you can type the stuff in on a computer keyboard, I don't see any better alternative. NIFF is binary, so it's not an option (at the very least, you'd have to come up with a textual equivalent). SDML looks a lot more complex and a lot less easy to type in than Lilypond.
Note, incidentally, that PDF is not really a binary format. It's a text format that has some facilities for in-line compression. But if you want to, you can type in a PDF file completely in text form and not lose any functionality.
It means the line has 50% more capacity. It may also create considerably less noise at high speeds, which both passengers and nearby residents probably appreciate.
VMs are bitches to write and the best one is produced by the folks with the
most experience (Namely the ParcPlace Smalltalk VM that's been honed and
whetted by experience since 1977.) Java's second with 1996. Nineteen years
difference.
I think Microsoft misrepresents the complexity and timeframe of what they are attempting, but you overestimate it. Good dynamic runtimes and dynamic compilers are non-trivial, but there have been considerably more than ParcPlace and Java. In fact, you can get about half a dozen good, mature ones in open source off the net.
Microsoft has the resources to build a good dynamic runtime, but getting the bugs out and the tuning still requires real-world feedback. My guess is that it will probably take them 3-4 years to produce something decent. Until then, they merely need to give the appearance that they are producing something decent, something that MS marketing is quite good at.
Microsoft doesn't have any control over that. The IE architecture allows people to plug in whatever they want. If they don't provide support for Java in IE, Sun or someone else will, including auto download and auto install.
The Java trademark is proprietary, but Java itself isn't. That hasn't hurt Java. In fact, it's good.
There are already several open source implementations: Intel's open runtime, GNU gcj, TransVirtual's Kaffe, and Japhar. They are incomplete and not fully compatible, but they are getting better, and they offer some useful non-100%-Java add-ons. And because they aren't called "Java", people don't get confused. Everybody is happy.
Even Microsoft can freely implement themselves something that works like Java and runs existing Java code. They just can't try to confuse their customers about what they are getting: that's what trademarks are for.
That may make
C#'s passage into the world a little tricky if Sun has much of the Java technology
patented...
While I think Sun Java is a good system, it is old technology. If Sun has patents on any fundamental aspect of Java or Java implementations, those patents are unlikely to be valid, and if there is any significant economic incentive for challenging them, they will be challenged.
Sun may have legally valid patents on some peripheral aspects of Java that they can use to make it hard for others to produce compliant implementations. But trying to enforce such patents against third party implementations would be suicide for the Java platform.
About 20 years ago, there used to be programming environments that supported XP, runtime safety, incremental development and testing, and rapid development. They were things like the Lisp machine and the Smalltalk-80 environment.
Don't get me wrong: those systems had their own share of problems, not the least of which was that they required expensive hardware to run well. They also lacked some of the niceties and safety check of modern programming languages (by which I mean languages like ML, not C++).
So, what can you do? Don't blindly use C/C++ for everything. Those languages have their place, but they require you to spend a lot of time on stuff that isn't related to getting the job done. Learn something new, and learn about the history of all this. Here are some suggestions:
Learn about logic programming with one of the Prolog implementations.
Read up on CommonLisp, Flavors, CLOS, and the Lisp Machine Window System. You can get CommonLisp implemenations at cons.org
Read up on Scheme and get a Scheme programming environment. PLT Scheme looks pretty good.
Read up on Smalltalk-80 and its programming environment (you can get a so-so Smalltalk-80 implementation at Squeak).
While those systems may or may not help you in your day-to-day work, they teach a lot about what programming can be.
For your day-to-day work, consider using languages and environments like Python, Perl, and Java. They aren't quite as convenient as the more academic systems I mention above, but they still let you focus much more on the problem rather than the mechanics of programming.
Deciding exactly how independent a program must be in order to qualify as being a GPL'ed program is something that requires some thought.
Oh, I think you are smart enough to figure out the intent in most cases. If you really can't figure it out, it's safe not to use the library until you have contacted the author and asked.
If it helps, ask yourself "if this were a software package and license from a big company with a lot of trigger-happy lawyers, would I risk trying to get away with this?" If the answer is "no", don't do it. After all, you already got the software for free, so it would seem proper to show at least as much gratitude and respect as you would show a business partner.
What you're missing is that the GPL is a political tool, not a source code license.
In fact, GPL is a license like a binary-only license, only that you get a much better deal: not only do you get the executables, you also get the source code. You can even redistribute it, and you don't have to pay for it. And if you want to reuse the code commercially, you can license it from its author.
But that doesn't make the GPL a "political tool" (a political tool for what, one might ask?) any more or less than it makes your favorite binary-only, costly, we-own-your-firstborn-son license a political tool. At best, one might argue that the GPL is used as a marketing tool by some companies.
As a political tool, hey, whatever you can get away with to force other people to release THEIR code, no matter
that it has nothing to do with YOUR contribution.
You aren't forced to do anything. If you don't like the license, don't use the code and don't contribute to it. In fact, in some cases, I would fully agree that it is a bad idea to base one's software on a GPL'ed library.
The intent of the GPL license is pretty clear: if you "use" the code, you should open source your own code.
There are a bunch of pragmatic exceptions to that rule, involving "system libraries". But it is unlikely that authors who placed their code under the GPL intended those exceptions in your case. Even if you can legally get away exploiting a loophole in the GPL, I would consider that unethical.
If in doubt, contact the author and have them clarify any ambiguities in writing. They may ask you to sign a separate commercial license and pay for it. And, given that you intend to charge for your software, you should be happy to pay for their software.
If it's covered by the BSD license, the intent and letter of the license should be clear: you can almost certainly use it.
Gtk is object oriented, it just happens to be written in C. If anything, it's actually a bit more flexible than if you build a toolkit in C++.
The problem with toolkits like Gtk and Qt is not in their object orientation, it is with other aspects of the underlying C/C++ languages, foremost lack of reflection and runtime safety.
Gtk (and Qt, for that matter) gets somewhat easier and safer to use if you use a language binding to something like Python. That doesn't make the toolkit itself any easier to extend, but it helps with application programming.
Because they're tired of seeing "plugin not suported" when they try to do anything interesting on the web.
Linux supports Java, Flash, MP3, and MPEG. RealNetworks also has a client for Linux.
The only significant content that is not easily supported on Linux is stuff for Windows Media Player and Quicktime. And there is nothing that "unix geeks" can do about it: that's proprietary content in proprietary formats, and you are at the mercy of a couple of big companies.
The solution to that problem is to "just say no" and complain to web masters. Tell CDNOW and Amazon that you aren't going to buy if they don't provide all samples in MP3 or some other open format. It is stupid for them to put content in proprietary formats, and it is stupid for you as a user to support those formats, whether you are using UNIX, Windows, or MacOS.
Gnome is currently providing Win95 levels of functionality - actually, a more accurate statement would
be somewhere between Win3.1 and Win95 - there are still critical features regarding drag and drop
that Windows users have enjoyed for nearly five years that Gnome still does not support.
Gnome supports drag and drop just fine. As for actual levels of functionality, there is very little difference between Windows 95 and Windows 2000, so if Gnome is close to one, it's close to the other.
Unix had Xerox style UIs for years before NeXT. Lots of black and white, ugly icons,
if any (Rob doesn't like them) and menu, bad fonts.
Compare these against NeXTSTEP (Sunview makes Windows 3 look really
good). At the time NeXTSTEP was a work of art.
Usability and pretty appearance are pretty unrelated. That's true not only for computers but also for love. But I digress.
Did you ever use Sunview? A Blit?
Yup. Sunview, NeWS, X10, and even a Blit.
Oh, did people realise NeXTSTEP developer shipped with a nice little [...]
That was ten years ago. What were PCs doing at the time? They can almost do what the ($20K) NeXT machine did back then.
But the NeXT ultimately was a big failure because it didn't deliver on its promise. It didn't try to innovate. Its big promise was to deliver existing, known high-end object technology on mainstream hardware and software at a reasonable price.
What NeXT ended up doing was delivering a compromise (albeit a very well engineered compromise) at a cost that was no lower than the uncompromisingly engineered, special-purpose machines that preceded it by nearly a decade.
The sad thing is that NeXT had the right idea in principle. It was Jobs's fondness for expensive frills that drove up the price and made the thing fail.
Display PostScript - Mac OS X has Quartz, but one can't execute arbitrary PS code
The replacement for Display PostScript on MacOS X (and UNIX, for that matter) is Java. Java gives you the same PostScript imaging model and it addresses the main shortcomings of DPS: poor isolation of tasks, poor performance, poor programmability, and poor error checking. Java is the next generation of DPS.
built-in PostScript Faxing
That's a free download for a PC, and it ships with every Linux box.
general UI - scroll bars on wrong side, crippled print panel, etc.
I think those are individual preferences. I prefer the scrollbar on the RHS because I can keep my mouse close to it and not have it cover up any content.
It was a breakthrough in one important area: it made Unix easy to use. More specifically, it was a Unix system easy enough for one's grandmother could use
If you say that they were the first machines to bring a Xerox/Macintosh style UI to a commercial, UNIX-based platform, I think that would a bit more accurate. But even then, Smalltalk provided that kind of UI on UNIX platforms years before NeXT.
But there are many other styles of easy-to-use UIs. Your ATM probably runs on UNIX--is it difficult to use or administer? Many uses of UNIX in banking, offices, and other applications have similar, highly specialized and very easy-to-use UIs. And I have seen many non-computer folks become productive with the UNIX command line with no problems; it's not rocket science and only takes a few hours.
Linux today is better, but [...] there's still too much resorting to the shell and the editing of configuration files.
If you use something like Webmin, you get an easy-to-use, browser-based administration system for Linux. I don't think even NeXT has come close to that kind of simplicity.
Still, I don't want to diminish the significance of the NeXT machine. It was an excellent engineering achievement and its legacy lives on both in Java and in MacOS X.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt Transmeta's IP is worth anywhere near that. Other people know quite well how to build fast low-power processors or how to create processors with adaptable instruction sets. Besides, the x86 architecture will be getting less and less important over the upcoming years.
The USPS is an organization staffed with real people, with a limited budget, and with a legal mandate to try to deliver mail. If people do these kinds of things, their costs go up and other mail delivery suffers. And a number of poor people have to deal with your smelly cheese or risk injuring themselves on your poorly packaged item.
People here would complain loudly if a 10M file clogged up their mail queue. It seems much worse to impose these kinds of physical hazards on real postal workers.
Squeak Smalltalk runs on WinCE devices, and it has an approach to programming more similar to what you might find on the Newton. Maybe it could fill a similar niche?
The Newton and the Palm are two different classes of devices because of their different sizes, prices, and weights, and I doubt they would be competing much. The Newton would, however, be significant competition to WinCE machines.
It works fine for what it was originally intended: simple calendaring, address book, and short notes. The problem is that it is now being presented as a "platform" for complex custom applications, and that it isn't very good for.
But think about the patents (look for "Altschul" on delphion.com). The patents aren't on any technology to make the phone particularly cheap or light or easy to manufacture. They are on the notion of a disposable phone itself, and a phone that only works for a limited amount of time. Where is the invention there?
Since the article raises the issue of "women inventors", what this demonstrates to me is merely that women can be just as greedy as men. For women who are smart technologists, we have to look elsewhere. Fortunately, they are around.
ksh was a nice enhancement, but it was proprietary for too long, and I think there is little reason to prefer it over bash now. For heavy-duty scripting, ksh may still be slightly better than bash now, but for those applications there are better alternatives: Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, etc. In fact, for a while, ksh was trying to go for the scripting space that Tcl/Tk was in (including dynamic loading and widgets), and in that area, it was never competitive with Tcl/Tk.
Mr. Whetherell tells us so himself: He warned the company would defend its patent rights "if necessary . . . to the letter of the law.", which tells us that questions of ethical behavior or technological innovation presumably don't matter as long as there is still a legal loophole to be pursued.
The greed that has surrounded the whole VC industry over the last few years has caused people to lose fortunes, stalled important research by drawing away good people, discouraged long-term investment in research by stable companies, and made it nearly impossible to share and build on each other's research results, both in computer science and in biotechnology.
What can you do about it? There are some ideas that probably do need to get funded in a VC environment, and there are some far-out ideas that probably are well suited to that kind of funding. But for the most part, it's probably better not to do business with VCs, not to solicit funding from them, and not to work for startups. Not much good can come of companies that are fueled mostly by greed and irrational expectations. If you have a good idea, you can almost certainly find many other ways of financing it and building a business around it.
You don't "pay copyrights" for patents. In fact, patents have nothing to do with copyrights, not in the US and not in Britain.
If the Financial Times "legal correspondent" can't keep the difference between patents and copyrights straight, how accurate can the rest of the reporting be?
Actually, most of the great works of music were produced with little or no copyright protection at all. I'd be perfectly satisfied if all future generations of US musicians were such slackers as Mozart, Bach, or Handel.
Instead, our tough copyright laws give us such ``quality'' as Madonna, Britney Spears, and the Jacksons. The good, less popular stuff merely falls by the wayside and disappears from circulation, since it is locked up by the same copyright laws that those packaged products demand. That seems like a lose-lose deal to me.
Note, incidentally, that PDF is not really a binary format. It's a text format that has some facilities for in-line compression. But if you want to, you can type in a PDF file completely in text form and not lose any functionality.
It means the line has 50% more capacity. It may also create considerably less noise at high speeds, which both passengers and nearby residents probably appreciate.
I think Microsoft misrepresents the complexity and timeframe of what they are attempting, but you overestimate it. Good dynamic runtimes and dynamic compilers are non-trivial, but there have been considerably more than ParcPlace and Java. In fact, you can get about half a dozen good, mature ones in open source off the net.
Microsoft has the resources to build a good dynamic runtime, but getting the bugs out and the tuning still requires real-world feedback. My guess is that it will probably take them 3-4 years to produce something decent. Until then, they merely need to give the appearance that they are producing something decent, something that MS marketing is quite good at.
Microsoft doesn't have any control over that. The IE architecture allows people to plug in whatever they want. If they don't provide support for Java in IE, Sun or someone else will, including auto download and auto install.
There are already several open source implementations: Intel's open runtime, GNU gcj, TransVirtual's Kaffe, and Japhar. They are incomplete and not fully compatible, but they are getting better, and they offer some useful non-100%-Java add-ons. And because they aren't called "Java", people don't get confused. Everybody is happy.
Even Microsoft can freely implement themselves something that works like Java and runs existing Java code. They just can't try to confuse their customers about what they are getting: that's what trademarks are for.
While I think Sun Java is a good system, it is old technology. If Sun has patents on any fundamental aspect of Java or Java implementations, those patents are unlikely to be valid, and if there is any significant economic incentive for challenging them, they will be challenged.
Sun may have legally valid patents on some peripheral aspects of Java that they can use to make it hard for others to produce compliant implementations. But trying to enforce such patents against third party implementations would be suicide for the Java platform.
Don't get me wrong: those systems had their own share of problems, not the least of which was that they required expensive hardware to run well. They also lacked some of the niceties and safety check of modern programming languages (by which I mean languages like ML, not C++).
So, what can you do? Don't blindly use C/C++ for everything. Those languages have their place, but they require you to spend a lot of time on stuff that isn't related to getting the job done. Learn something new, and learn about the history of all this. Here are some suggestions:
While those systems may or may not help you in your day-to-day work, they teach a lot about what programming can be.
For your day-to-day work, consider using languages and environments like Python, Perl, and Java. They aren't quite as convenient as the more academic systems I mention above, but they still let you focus much more on the problem rather than the mechanics of programming.
Oh, I think you are smart enough to figure out the intent in most cases. If you really can't figure it out, it's safe not to use the library until you have contacted the author and asked.
If it helps, ask yourself "if this were a software package and license from a big company with a lot of trigger-happy lawyers, would I risk trying to get away with this?" If the answer is "no", don't do it. After all, you already got the software for free, so it would seem proper to show at least as much gratitude and respect as you would show a business partner.
In fact, GPL is a license like a binary-only license, only that you get a much better deal: not only do you get the executables, you also get the source code. You can even redistribute it, and you don't have to pay for it. And if you want to reuse the code commercially, you can license it from its author.
But that doesn't make the GPL a "political tool" (a political tool for what, one might ask?) any more or less than it makes your favorite binary-only, costly, we-own-your-firstborn-son license a political tool. At best, one might argue that the GPL is used as a marketing tool by some companies.
As a political tool, hey, whatever you can get away with to force other people to release THEIR code, no matter that it has nothing to do with YOUR contribution.
You aren't forced to do anything. If you don't like the license, don't use the code and don't contribute to it. In fact, in some cases, I would fully agree that it is a bad idea to base one's software on a GPL'ed library.
There are a bunch of pragmatic exceptions to that rule, involving "system libraries". But it is unlikely that authors who placed their code under the GPL intended those exceptions in your case. Even if you can legally get away exploiting a loophole in the GPL, I would consider that unethical.
If in doubt, contact the author and have them clarify any ambiguities in writing. They may ask you to sign a separate commercial license and pay for it. And, given that you intend to charge for your software, you should be happy to pay for their software.
If it's covered by the BSD license, the intent and letter of the license should be clear: you can almost certainly use it.
The problem with toolkits like Gtk and Qt is not in their object orientation, it is with other aspects of the underlying C/C++ languages, foremost lack of reflection and runtime safety.
Gtk (and Qt, for that matter) gets somewhat easier and safer to use if you use a language binding to something like Python. That doesn't make the toolkit itself any easier to extend, but it helps with application programming.
Linux supports Java, Flash, MP3, and MPEG. RealNetworks also has a client for Linux.
The only significant content that is not easily supported on Linux is stuff for Windows Media Player and Quicktime. And there is nothing that "unix geeks" can do about it: that's proprietary content in proprietary formats, and you are at the mercy of a couple of big companies.
The solution to that problem is to "just say no" and complain to web masters. Tell CDNOW and Amazon that you aren't going to buy if they don't provide all samples in MP3 or some other open format. It is stupid for them to put content in proprietary formats, and it is stupid for you as a user to support those formats, whether you are using UNIX, Windows, or MacOS.
Gnome supports drag and drop just fine. As for actual levels of functionality, there is very little difference between Windows 95 and Windows 2000, so if Gnome is close to one, it's close to the other.
Usability and pretty appearance are pretty unrelated. That's true not only for computers but also for love. But I digress.
Yup. Sunview, NeWS, X10, and even a Blit.
But the NeXT ultimately was a big failure because it didn't deliver on its promise. It didn't try to innovate. Its big promise was to deliver existing, known high-end object technology on mainstream hardware and software at a reasonable price.
What NeXT ended up doing was delivering a compromise (albeit a very well engineered compromise) at a cost that was no lower than the uncompromisingly engineered, special-purpose machines that preceded it by nearly a decade.
The sad thing is that NeXT had the right idea in principle. It was Jobs's fondness for expensive frills that drove up the price and made the thing fail.
The replacement for Display PostScript on MacOS X (and UNIX, for that matter) is Java. Java gives you the same PostScript imaging model and it addresses the main shortcomings of DPS: poor isolation of tasks, poor performance, poor programmability, and poor error checking. Java is the next generation of DPS.
built-in PostScript Faxing
That's a free download for a PC, and it ships with every Linux box.
general UI - scroll bars on wrong side, crippled print panel, etc.
I think those are individual preferences. I prefer the scrollbar on the RHS because I can keep my mouse close to it and not have it cover up any content.
If you say that they were the first machines to bring a Xerox/Macintosh style UI to a commercial, UNIX-based platform, I think that would a bit more accurate. But even then, Smalltalk provided that kind of UI on UNIX platforms years before NeXT.
But there are many other styles of easy-to-use UIs. Your ATM probably runs on UNIX--is it difficult to use or administer? Many uses of UNIX in banking, offices, and other applications have similar, highly specialized and very easy-to-use UIs. And I have seen many non-computer folks become productive with the UNIX command line with no problems; it's not rocket science and only takes a few hours.
If you use something like Webmin, you get an easy-to-use, browser-based administration system for Linux. I don't think even NeXT has come close to that kind of simplicity.
Still, I don't want to diminish the significance of the NeXT machine. It was an excellent engineering achievement and its legacy lives on both in Java and in MacOS X.