There is no real distinction between developers and end-users in the GPL software ecosystem. Both are users of code; they just use it in different ways.
Considering what's been said in mainstream press this week such as ComputerWorld where CIO's have "taken offense" by Ballmer's statements, combined with the statements from IBM, Novell, and other sources such as Groklaw, I think it is clear to everyone from the clueless to the initiated that Ballmer's statements are complete bull -- unfounded, unsupported, and powerless. This thing has clearly backfired, and can just be filed away with the ongoing pathetic MS attacks on Linux, right along with the Halloween documents and the SCO debacle.
This has really been a good incident, and Linux users should be happy to see Ballmer shoot himself in the foot so publicly. He looks both clueless, and like a bully, all at the same time. And as a dividend, the world sees yet again how well defended Linux is, from the grassroots all the way up to the corporate level. It's another deflected bullet, providing yet another real world example of Linux's armor.
Thanks Ballmer. Keep up the good work. You may as well be wearing a GNU/Linux T-Shirt.
Miguel and the rest of the Ximian and Mono team should just pack their bags and get the fuck out. This whole deal with Novell and Microsoft was only possible with their help, and probable instigation. I've had misgivings about.NET on Linux ever since the idea was suggested by Miguel and the worst fears have been verified by this new Novell/Microsoft contract.
Somebody is modding down whole threads criticizing the behavior of certain individuals involved in this sordid affair. Disagree? Speak your piece, don't be a slimeball.
If anyone is part of this community, it's Nat. Need I tell you what Nat has done for GNOME? If anyone represents the community it is Nat and I am sure Miguel de Icaza was not far behind him in his support.
Done for Gnome? Made it develop too slowly, paid far too little attention to little issues of reliability and usability, frittered away millions of dollars of investment and mainly just milked it for self-promotion. If Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza ever represented the communit, which is debatable, they certainly do not now.
"We have never seen any need for patent protection for Linux, and we don't see any need for it now. If legal claims exist, they should be resolved between vendors and not involve end-user customers." -- Scott Handy
This statement betrays a fundamental disconnect: Scott forgot to mention the developers, the real engine of the community.
It is just a vertex shading pipeline and a very simplified pixel shading pipeline. Sony expected people to do all their pixel effects on the Cell, but that isn't working out too well which is why people are noticing fullscreen effects looking worse on PS3 versions of games like NFS:Carbon.
All you have noticed is that a highly optimized renderer isn't in service on day one, big surprise. As far as pixel shaders and vertex shaders go, you have got your FUD garbled. The RSX has on-board pixel shaders, and vertex shading is done by the Cells' SPE units. This approach pipelines well and looks perfectly elegant to me.
As I understand it, the Unreal engine is optimized for the Cell+RSX combo and Sony will sublicense it to any PS3 developer. I do not think we have seen a PS3 game yet that uses the Unreal engine, please correct me if I'm wrong.
theoretically the attacker could use javascript or any other locally interpreted language or an ActiveX control under Internet Explorer to run the attacking process as the same user. To get the attacking process scheduled on the same core as the RSA process, just spawn lots of attacker processes. Some of them will get scheduled alongside the crypto process, even on a massively parallel machine.
OK, so obviously the attack can be thwarted by preventing a crypto thread from sharing a core with any untrusted thread. A straightforward kernel scheduler hack, a new core affinity API to expose, crypto applications to amend, and done. I do not belittle the amount of effort implied by what I just suggested, perhaps there is a much easier fix. My proposal does have the advantage of avoiding nasty, performance sucking hacks to obscure the timing information, and it handles a whole class of timing attacks.
Netcraft confirms: IBM, Sun, and Google make boatloads of money off of the countless unnamed and unpaid developers who write the code that they use. Does the amount they contribute back exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others?
Even before I join Google I never minded the idea that some corporations would benefit from the work I did, it is totally ok with me. In fact I would get really worried if that were not the case, it would mean I failed to make something useful. Speaking as an open sourcer, I always expected the companies you mention to contribute something back, firstly because it is in their interest to do so (offload the maintenance, get further free development, etc) and secondly because it is the right thing to do, and there is no underestimating the PR value of being seen to do the right thing. The "balance of payments" doesn't really matter, what matters is that *something* comes back, enough to keep the ecosystem healthy. As it turns out, all three companies you mentioned are contributing way more than I ever dreamed possible. Halleluja.
While not binary compatible, the 8086 was a 16-bit improvement of the 8-bit 8080, which was compatible with the 8008, which AFAIK wasn't too far from the 4-bit 4040 and the 4004
"...software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as...lower cost hardware..."
I'm assuming by this he means that as hardware costs drop, the overall product cost can remain the same or even increase, thereby increasing the percentage of revenue that's attributable to the software.
Or he was misquoted, or he rambled. I will bet on the "rambled".
So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies. Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about. But trust me.... You don't. I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you don't know what you are talking about. This is how bad info gets passed around.
Well you didn't help much by waltzing in, making some smells and riding away on a high horse. Care to mention specifics?
the whole reason Microsoft started down this path is to narrow the market for Linux distros down to one.
Probably the main reason all right, though the strategy appears to have been conceived with more than one goal. Anyway, there is Canonical on the way up. I really need to get me some of that IPO, if it happens.
Novell will go bust. This will mean they will not do ANY OSS development anymore.
Just like any corporation, a small minority of Novell employees do the all work that is useful to the community. Now speaking with my Google hat on (just this post!) we will be more than happy to talk to any community contributors who wish to leave Novell over this issue. As a recognized contributor, you would have to work at it not to get a position here, from which you can continue your valuable work.
Microsoft is just now getting around to "art of war" type tactics: divide your enemies. "He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks." They're trying to divide the open source movement's spirit.
Interesting take on the situation. Actually Microsoft's gambit will help achieve exactly the state favored by Sun Tzu, by cutting the divided spirit of Novell out of the pack. Never mind that bringing Novell under its wing is sure to cause new tensions within Microsoft itself.
After plenty of gameplay the console is cool -- or at worst warm -- to the touch on every surface. In a side by side test with the Xbox 360, the console is comparably virtually silent, and the Blu-ray drive is significantly quieter than the 360's DVD drive.
So let me guess, some Microsoft employee read the part of the post where I quote Engadget as saying the PS3 is signifcantly quieter than the Xbox 360, and modded it down as overrated.
Based on the euphoric reaction [ign.com] to PS3's flagship launch title Resistance: Fall of Man [wikipedia.org] Sony has nailed this, the PS3 is a guaranteed long term hit. In spite of all the FUD (I wonder who sponsored that) the machine performs to spec and production qualities are top notch. Oh yes, I'm a PS3 fan. After all it is a Linux machine, not to mention a superb piece of engineering.
I personally won't bat an eye about dropping $600 on this box. After all, I'm picking up a $2,500 flat screen tv [samsung.com] to go with it. Sony is obviously going to be selling every box it can make for a long time. Now the race to dominate the high end console market comes down to one thing: Sony's manufacturing ramp-up.
The post was obviously not a troll. Microsoft employee with mod points?
I don't know how many free software projects would be able to do this.
How many do it is not material, just a few need to do it to create the desired effect.
In the case of Linux, this "modified license" approach would require Linux to be rewritten from scratch. The GPL won't allow you to make a derivative work without licensing it under the same version of the GPL that Linux already uses. Ironically, the same legal constraint that keeps closed source vendors from making proprietary extentions to Linux also prevents the use of more restrictive licenses.
Not every project uses the GPL, Apache to name one prominent example. There are plenty more.
Microsoft and Novell want to debate the fine print of the GPL. Fine, let them debate. While that debate drags on (and you can be sure Microsoft will drag it on as long as possible) we can take direct and effective action to uphold not only the letter of the law, but the spirit of the community.
There is nothing specific in the GPL that says they cannot make a deal with Microsoft.
That depends on what kind of deal they make with Microsoft. If it is a deal that requires a license from Microsoft (or covenant as Microsoft likes to style it) in order to distribute Linux then the GPL does have something specific to say about it.
The only thing that will stop companies from doing things like this, is if they lose customer support. If you don't like it, don't buy their products.
The only thing? Far from it, there is a lot we can do. For example, many free software projects are in a position to carry on further development under a modified license that clearly and directly prohibits the anti-community behaviour in which Novell has indulged (as compared to the GPL language that prohibits it but leaves enough room for a sufficiently determined weasel to wiggle). This would mean that Novell's distribution cannot distribute the latest versions of many software packages, making it inferior to other distributions. The media will immediately lap this up, negating the recent round of clueless or even paid-for reporting in favor Microsoft's latest strategem.
OK, the Samba team has asked nicely, that's wonderful. But with visions of Microsoft's filthy lucre dancing in their collective heads, Novell management may well decide to hold fast to their new, suicidal course.
The end users who buy from these middlemen are *every bit* as guilty as Sony or the middlemen.
Which is to say, guilty of exactly nothing. Guilty of giving a little bit of paying work to homeless people. Anybody thought to ask the homeless people what they thought of the deal? No that would make too much sense.
What a stupid troll article, the only interesting thing is how many responders took the bait uncritically.
You seem to draw your points out of thin air rather than basing them on actual research and published data.
What do you think this is?. "At the end of 2004, there were 11 million HD households, each owning an average of 1.2 HD sets." Two years ago. There were already millions. You're trying to denying what anybody can see is a huge trend to big flat screen TVs in the living room. Give it up, you need to get out more.
Wow, you responded to points I didn't even make, are you reading off a sheet of talking points or something? This is where you lose your remaining credibility:
I have several gamer friends, and not a one of them does anything but laugh at the idea of buying a PS3. And these are single friends making $50k+ a year, living in low cost of living cities.
Flat screens of 40 inches or larger will sell by the boatload this year, just like last year except more so. Look at your own link, most of the products on it are in the $1000 - $2000 range.
My point is simple: at $600, the first wave of customers just aren't concerned about the price, the HD TV to go with it is more expensive. I am not sure what point you are trying to make.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no real distinction between developers and end-users in the GPL software ecosystem. Both are users of code; they just use it in different ways.
He specifically said "end-user customers".
Considering what's been said in mainstream press this week such as ComputerWorld where CIO's have "taken offense" by Ballmer's statements, combined with the statements from IBM, Novell, and other sources such as Groklaw, I think it is clear to everyone from the clueless to the initiated that Ballmer's statements are complete bull -- unfounded, unsupported, and powerless. This thing has clearly backfired, and can just be filed away with the ongoing pathetic MS attacks on Linux, right along with the Halloween documents and the SCO debacle.
This has really been a good incident, and Linux users should be happy to see Ballmer shoot himself in the foot so publicly. He looks both clueless, and like a bully, all at the same time. And as a dividend, the world sees yet again how well defended Linux is, from the grassroots all the way up to the corporate level. It's another deflected bullet, providing yet another real world example of Linux's armor.
Thanks Ballmer. Keep up the good work. You may as well be wearing a GNU/Linux T-Shirt.
Who modded that down and who do they work for?
Miguel and the rest of the Ximian and Mono team should just pack their bags and get the fuck out. This whole deal with Novell and Microsoft was only possible with their help, and probable instigation. I've had misgivings about .NET on Linux ever since the idea was suggested by Miguel and the worst fears have been verified by this new Novell/Microsoft contract.
Somebody is modding down whole threads criticizing the behavior of certain individuals involved in this sordid affair. Disagree? Speak your piece, don't be a slimeball.
If anyone is part of this community, it's Nat. Need I tell you what Nat has done for GNOME? If anyone represents the community it is Nat and I am sure Miguel de Icaza was not far behind him in his support.
Done for Gnome? Made it develop too slowly, paid far too little attention to little issues of reliability and usability, frittered away millions of dollars of investment and mainly just milked it for self-promotion. If Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza ever represented the communit, which is debatable, they certainly do not now.
"We have never seen any need for patent protection for Linux, and we don't see any need for it now. If legal claims exist, they should be resolved between vendors and not involve end-user customers." -- Scott Handy
This statement betrays a fundamental disconnect: Scott forgot to mention the developers, the real engine of the community.
It is just a vertex shading pipeline and a very simplified pixel shading pipeline. Sony expected people to do all their pixel effects on the Cell, but that isn't working out too well which is why people are noticing fullscreen effects looking worse on PS3 versions of games like NFS:Carbon.
All you have noticed is that a highly optimized renderer isn't in service on day one, big surprise. As far as pixel shaders and vertex shaders go, you have got your FUD garbled. The RSX has on-board pixel shaders, and vertex shading is done by the Cells' SPE units. This approach pipelines well and looks perfectly elegant to me.
As I understand it, the Unreal engine is optimized for the Cell+RSX combo and Sony will sublicense it to any PS3 developer. I do not think we have seen a PS3 game yet that uses the Unreal engine, please correct me if I'm wrong.
theoretically the attacker could use javascript or any other locally interpreted language or an ActiveX control under Internet Explorer to run the attacking process as the same user. To get the attacking process scheduled on the same core as the RSA process, just spawn lots of attacker processes. Some of them will get scheduled alongside the crypto process, even on a massively parallel machine.
OK, so obviously the attack can be thwarted by preventing a crypto thread from sharing a core with any untrusted thread. A straightforward kernel scheduler hack, a new core affinity API to expose, crypto applications to amend, and done. I do not belittle the amount of effort implied by what I just suggested, perhaps there is a much easier fix. My proposal does have the advantage of avoiding nasty, performance sucking hacks to obscure the timing information, and it handles a whole class of timing attacks.
I do agree, the attack vector is valid.
Netcraft confirms: IBM, Sun, and Google make boatloads of money off of the countless unnamed and unpaid developers who write the code that they use. Does the amount they contribute back exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others?
Even before I join Google I never minded the idea that some corporations would benefit from the work I did, it is totally ok with me. In fact I would get really worried if that were not the case, it would mean I failed to make something useful. Speaking as an open sourcer, I always expected the companies you mention to contribute something back, firstly because it is in their interest to do so (offload the maintenance, get further free development, etc) and secondly because it is the right thing to do, and there is no underestimating the PR value of being seen to do the right thing. The "balance of payments" doesn't really matter, what matters is that *something* comes back, enough to keep the ecosystem healthy. As it turns out, all three companies you mentioned are contributing way more than I ever dreamed possible. Halleluja.
While not binary compatible, the 8086 was a 16-bit improvement of the 8-bit 8080, which was compatible with the 8008, which AFAIK wasn't too far from the 4-bit 4040 and the 4004
Indeed. Does this instruction ring a bell? Decimal adjust accumulator DAA
"...software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as...lower cost hardware..."
I'm assuming by this he means that as hardware costs drop, the overall product cost can remain the same or even increase, thereby increasing the percentage of revenue that's attributable to the software.
Or he was misquoted, or he rambled. I will bet on the "rambled".
So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies. Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about.
But trust me.... You don't. I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you don't know what you are talking about.
This is how bad info gets passed around.
Well you didn't help much by waltzing in, making some smells and riding away on a high horse. Care to mention specifics?
the whole reason Microsoft started down this path is to narrow the market for Linux distros down to one.
Probably the main reason all right, though the strategy appears to have been conceived with more than one goal. Anyway, there is Canonical on the way up. I really need to get me some of that IPO, if it happens.
Novell will go bust. This will mean they will not do ANY OSS development anymore.
Just like any corporation, a small minority of Novell employees do the all work that is useful to the community. Now speaking with my Google hat on (just this post!) we will be more than happy to talk to any community contributors who wish to leave Novell over this issue. As a recognized contributor, you would have to work at it not to get a position here, from which you can continue your valuable work.
Microsoft is just now getting around to "art of war" type tactics: divide your enemies. "He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks." They're trying to divide the open source movement's spirit.
Interesting take on the situation. Actually Microsoft's gambit will help achieve exactly the state favored by Sun Tzu, by cutting the divided spirit of Novell out of the pack. Never mind that bringing Novell under its wing is sure to cause new tensions within Microsoft itself.
If GNOME ever gets sued for patent infringement, you can bet Novell will be at its defense.
I think it is a better bet that Microsoft would make it worth Novell's while to support such a suit.
it's already been made clear that GPL3 will close this loophole
If there even is a loophole.
After plenty of gameplay the console is cool -- or at worst warm -- to the touch on every surface. In a side by side test with the Xbox 360, the console is comparably virtually silent, and the Blu-ray drive is significantly quieter than the 360's DVD drive.
So let me guess, some Microsoft employee read the part of the post where I quote Engadget as saying the PS3 is signifcantly quieter than the Xbox 360, and modded it down as overrated.
Based on the euphoric reaction [ign.com] to PS3's flagship launch title Resistance: Fall of Man [wikipedia.org] Sony has nailed this, the PS3 is a guaranteed long term hit. In spite of all the FUD (I wonder who sponsored that) the machine performs to spec and production qualities are top notch. Oh yes, I'm a PS3 fan. After all it is a Linux machine, not to mention a superb piece of engineering.
I personally won't bat an eye about dropping $600 on this box. After all, I'm picking up a $2,500 flat screen tv [samsung.com] to go with it. Sony is obviously going to be selling every box it can make for a long time. Now the race to dominate the high end console market comes down to one thing: Sony's manufacturing ramp-up.
The post was obviously not a troll. Microsoft employee with mod points?
I don't know how many free software projects would be able to do this.
How many do it is not material, just a few need to do it to create the desired effect.
In the case of Linux, this "modified license" approach would require Linux to be rewritten from scratch. The GPL won't allow you to make a derivative work without licensing it under the same version of the GPL that Linux already uses. Ironically, the same legal constraint that keeps closed source vendors from making proprietary extentions to Linux also prevents the use of more restrictive licenses.
Not every project uses the GPL, Apache to name one prominent example. There are plenty more.
Microsoft and Novell want to debate the fine print of the GPL. Fine, let them debate. While that debate drags on (and you can be sure Microsoft will drag it on as long as possible) we can take direct and effective action to uphold not only the letter of the law, but the spirit of the community.
There is nothing specific in the GPL that says they cannot make a deal with Microsoft.
That depends on what kind of deal they make with Microsoft. If it is a deal that requires a license from Microsoft (or covenant as Microsoft likes to style it) in order to distribute Linux then the GPL does have something specific to say about it.
The only thing that will stop companies from doing things like this, is if they lose customer support. If you don't like it, don't buy their products.
The only thing? Far from it, there is a lot we can do. For example, many free software projects are in a position to carry on further development under a modified license that clearly and directly prohibits the anti-community behaviour in which Novell has indulged (as compared to the GPL language that prohibits it but leaves enough room for a sufficiently determined weasel to wiggle). This would mean that Novell's distribution cannot distribute the latest versions of many software packages, making it inferior to other distributions. The media will immediately lap this up, negating the recent round of clueless or even paid-for reporting in favor Microsoft's latest strategem.
OK, the Samba team has asked nicely, that's wonderful. But with visions of Microsoft's filthy lucre dancing in their collective heads, Novell management may well decide to hold fast to their new, suicidal course.
The end users who buy from these middlemen are *every bit* as guilty as Sony or the middlemen.
Which is to say, guilty of exactly nothing. Guilty of giving a little bit of paying work to homeless people. Anybody thought to ask the homeless people what they thought of the deal? No that would make too much sense.
What a stupid troll article, the only interesting thing is how many responders took the bait uncritically.
You seem to draw your points out of thin air rather than basing them on actual research and published data.
What do you think this is?. "At the end of 2004, there were 11 million HD households, each owning an average of 1.2 HD sets." Two years ago. There were already millions. You're trying to denying what anybody can see is a huge trend to big flat screen TVs in the living room. Give it up, you need to get out more.
Wow, you responded to points I didn't even make, are you reading off a sheet of talking points or something? This is where you lose your remaining credibility:
I have several gamer friends, and not a one of them does anything but laugh at the idea of buying a PS3. And these are single friends making $50k+ a year, living in low cost of living cities.
You're nuts, this is diametrically opposed to my own sampling of gamer friends. At the end of 2004, there were 11 million HD households, each owning an average of 1.2 HD sets. Anyway, take your meds, relax for another week and check out the reaction to the US launch ok?
Flat screens of 40 inches or larger will sell by the boatload this year, just like last year except more so. Look at your own link, most of the products on it are in the $1000 - $2000 range.
My point is simple: at $600, the first wave of customers just aren't concerned about the price, the HD TV to go with it is more expensive. I am not sure what point you are trying to make.