I would imagine that straight ports from one to the other are difficult enough without licensing issues, so I doubt that's a major issue for Sun.
A few years ago, Sun bought the right to relicense, royalty free, all the drivers in SCO Unix. As a result, they already have a well established base of drivers. And if they need to "look over the shoulder" of another operating system to see how to build support for a driver they have missed, all three *BSDs are extremely well supported in hardware terms, often using drivers that fit the principles of the underlying OS far better than Linux does (the ipw3945 driver would be a very obvious example.)
I don't think you're missing anything, I think the author has confused a number of concepts.
SunOS is the Solaris kernel. Remove the Solaris userland, replace it with GNU, and you have an operating system that has some of Unix (some of the kernel - interestingly, a lot of it is SCO code... no licensing disputes though, Sun bought the rights from SCO, somewhat controvertially, a year or two ago) and mostly GNU.
Whether you need to is another matter. For the most part, I suspect most people (including Sun) will replace Solaris components with GNU ones on a case-by-case basis, as long as the operating system in totality is Free Software, there's no good reason not to choose the right tool for the job.
The GPL3 is not the same license as the majority because it hasn't been released yet. There is no other reason. Nobody has rejected it because there is nothing to reject.
The entire process is being driven by consensus. The DRM stuff is in there because regardless of the views of a vocal minority, most people interested in Free Software are well aware that software is not free if someone can simply define it as an "Access Control Mechanism" and then use the DMCA to tear apart anyone who changes that code in a way they don't like. The "signatures" thing is in there because regardless of the views of a vocal minority, most people interested in Free Software are well aware that software you cannot use in any modified form except those signed-off by a hardware manufacturer is not free.
And I might hazard a guess that the primary reason why Torvalds is being to vocal in winging about both of the above has to do with the amount of work he'd need to do to change the license in the first place, given his lack of forethought in neither adopting the "or later version" clause, or any alternative that would make it easy to upgrade the license to one similar in spirit without the active support of every single person who has ever made a "contribution", no matter how small, to the Linux kernel.
Either way, I'm not seeing much evidence that, outside of the Linux kernel, there's much rejection of GPL3 at all. And I am seeing much of the Free Software community who rejected GPL2 seeing GPL3 as a much better alternative. That's the aim, after all, to try to get a license that suits almost everyone who believes in Copyleft, and to end the current, insane, license forking that causes so much damage.
Yeah, clearly those parents named the child after a future middle eastern dictator they planned to admire when he became famous enough for them ot have heard of him. Did they invent time travel perchance? Is that your position?
In other news, my child will be called Ebeneezer Grunten McHaboloy, after the infamous President Charles Grunten, who took over America in 2020 and slaughtered the first born in every county for no reason whatsoever.
Java has a strange history. It was supposed to be a lightweight semi-interpreted language for use in web browsers. It ended up being the replacement for COBOL as a business application language, something nobody expected.
I'm not sure I agree with either the notion it was supposed to be for web browsers, or that it taking over from COBOL was unexpected.
Java was originally promoted as being from a project to effectively replace languages like FORTH for embedded applications. However, while this may have had some nominal truth to it, it was clear from the outset that it was actually a general purpose language intended to fix the major issues with modern programming languages that had tripped up most software designs since the 1970s.
Java taking over from COBOL, in that respect, is entirely expected in every way except the usual "But will people latch on to it" type thing. (ie Mac OS X or GNU/Linux could take over from Windows, functionality-wise they're well suited to do it, but would people actually make the move?) It's a clean programming language that fixes the major issues that C and C++ suffer from, and as such is a decent successor to old standbys that were being kept around largely because C derived languages were just plain dangerous. (Do you really want a whole bunch of banking transactions screwed up because of an undetected out-of-bounds error or worse?)
The really interesting thing now is to see whether Java's Free Software status will be enough for people to feel comfortable actually integrating it into operating systems. With the majority of new platforms being Free Software, it's been hard to do until now. That could change, and we might actually see it taking over from C++, something it's been close to doing for a while but not quite getting there.
Oh! Ok, I honestly thought it was stuck in permanent beta status (when I was troubleshooting this I went to Aerith's getting started page, which has a link to Mustang, which talks about snapshot releases and says no more work is going be done on it because of the open source Java 7 project. That'll teach me not to check further. Heh.)
Because Java has more to do on a desktop than on a mobile phone. Typical mobile phone firmware is less than a megabyte. Now compare that to, say, Mac OS X's/System directory. And in order to be useful, at the very least Java has to abstract (make available to Java programs) the majority of the useful capabilities of the underlying OS.
In some ways, given Java is doing a great deal to fix the flaws of the underlying OS at the same time as provide access to it, it's surprising that in today's multi-gigabyte OS world, it's still so small.
If you were to implement a version of Java for AmigaOS, containing only the features that AmigaOS supports (ie, AWT uses Gadtools and Intuition, no networking, HTML, or XML, etc) I'd be surprised if it ended up being more than a megabyte in size.
You make a good point. Back in 1976, when 128G was a huge amount of memory, it was foolishly insane to run StarOffice under Microsoft Vista Executive. It was much more sensible to run Microsoft Office, which Microsoft wisely first wrote in Python in 1966, under something like OpenBSD.
(Not only was StarOffice not written in Java, and had no links to Java in the time frame you're talking about, it still contains relatively small amounts of Java. Java has nothing to do with StarOffice's bloat, SO's a standard C++ application, and in addition to the usual problems with bloat and early OOPS applications, also incorporated a lot of things then that were a legacy of the poor application frameworks available for Unix at the time. For example, it contained an entire themable widget system, because the Unix world couldn't really settle on a standard widget set. Motif was proprietary. Athena was crude. OpenWindows was considered obsolete and too experimental (nice system though.) OpenStep was only available for a handful of platforms. etc. etc.)
I just had the same problem. Turns out that Aerith requires Java 6, which isn't an officially released version of Java yet, and running it under Java 5 causes a crash because it can't find java.awt.LinearGradientPaint.
Given it's still beta software, I think they can be forgiven for not putting in all the version checks that would have created a more useful error message, but it's still a little disappointing.
He's not against DRM. Mac OS X is protected with it (the Intel version has certain binaries such as Dock.app "protected" in this way using encryption and the TPM chip.) He's also spoken approvingly of DRM on Bluray.
He just appears to dislike it when it comes to music. And, to be honest, with Apple's absolutely hysterical comments in the past concerning, for example, France's attempts to outlaw DRM, I honestly think this is a new position, based upon forthcoming events, not because of pressure from Europe meaning Jobs feels like he can say what he always wanted to say really.
Quite honestly, the notion Steve Jobs has always been against DRM makes no sense whatsoever. There's no evidence for it, and there's plenty of evidence against it.
This would be the case if anyone's DRM but Apple's was in widespread use.
But this is not the case.
This would be relevent if we were talking about the situation right now, rather than the near future. However, we're not. What we're talking about here are the consequences of mobile phones developing further functionality, coupled with the further integration of DRM into Vista. The former is happening now. The latter is going to become an issue as 90% of computers become bundled with the Vista operating system.
Seriously, wake up. Your entire comment looks like a knee-jerk defense of Apple's future. Cellphones have obliterated the PDA market, they're already making in-roads on the digital camera front, and they're going to do the same for MP3 players. Steve Jobs "gets it". Not only does he know its going to happen, but he's getting Apple to ride that wave. And regardless of whether you agree with me, and agree with him, this is Apple's stance, so it's relevent to why Jobs wrote what he did. Back in July of last year, it even became their official position. To quote Peter Oppenheimer:
"As regards cell phones, we don't think that the phones that are available today make the best music players. We think the iPod is. But over time, that is likely to change. And we're not sitting around doing nothing."
So two things are going to happen: the most widespread DRM in the world will be Microsoft's, with users of other platforms (such as Macintosh) frozen out of an increasingly large amount of content; and Apple's lack of hardware marketshare will mean iTS will be all but irrelevent.
That's what's going to happen. That's what Steve Jobs is trying to deal with.
Perhaps because you have one computer, and do not particularly want to reboot every time you switch between doing something in your must-have Vista application, and doing something in your Mac environment?
Personally, I hate dual booting. I hate rebooting, period.
I covered this in my journal but I'll say it here too:
The issue is that the landscape has changed. The iTS and iPod exist in a symbiotic relationship where the strength of one strengthens the other. But that's about to come to an end. MP3 playing mobile phones are becoming more and more viable, with flash memory plummeting in price and the carriers themselves seeing OTA music sales as a great way to make use of their under-utilized Internet services. People don't like having to carry multiple devices around, and the convenience factor of a device that is a music store and mobile music player in one is going to, ultimately, trump the iPod. Right now, Apple's saving grace is the relative incompetence of most of the mobile phone makers, they can't rely upon that forever.
This is one side of the deal. They could have dealt with that by producing a viable mobile iTunes player and licensing it, or by dominating the mobile phone market, but what they've actually decided to do is enter the mobile phone market as a niche player. This makes them a competitor to all the other manufacturers, who are unlikely to license any kind of "mobile iTunes", and also means they'll never get a substantial market share of the new market in the same way that they did the iPod. One can make all kinds of guesses as to why they've decided to do this, but the bottom line is that Apple's days as the #1 seller of MP3 playing hardware are numbered.
The other is Vista. Vista has upped the ante in terms of DRM available. Mac users will be locked out of the content that will be available under Vista's DRM, and those chosing to publish content under a DRM scheme will see Vista's, as the one available to the most number of people, as being the one to go for.
It is no longer in Apple's best long term interests to promote DRM. In fact, DRM is likely to bite it to a point that its own platform may well no longer be viable within a few years.
Apple has, at least, dealt with that in one way: their computers, if push comes to shove, are capable of running Windows, and if it becomes a really serious issue, Apple could migrate to a Windows based platform. This would be the end of them as a company with control over their own platform, and would make them another Boutique computer maker like Lenovo and Sony. So naturally it's not where they want to go.
So I honestly believe Jobs is sincere when he claims to dislike DRM. He does... now that it's looking like it'll be a serious problem for Apple in the future. A successful DRM scheme from a competitor could well destroy Apple's position as an independent computer maker, making them beholden to that competitor and its interests. Such a situation has not been as realistic in the past as it is today.
One more thing: If Vista's DRM starts to take off, it may be time for Apple to take the gloves off with respect to Mac OS X market share. I'll leave you to speculate as to what they could do to make that happen.
I understood his analogy as being that nothing Ford does will make a car (using a conventional design) drive to Hawaii. Similarly, nothing Microsoft does will make DRM (using a TPM based system) work on a VM. It's an issue of technical possibilities.
Of course, my Lotus will drive to Hawaii, but Q never likes it when I do that.
Wow, yes, I do believe it's the first time anyone's ever questioned why someone would want Vista. Nobody in the history of "running Microsoft operating systems on computers that generally run some other OS" has ever asked the question "Why would anyone ever run {Microsoft's latest version of Windows}" to the best of my knowledge. It's a completely new and original question, and I believe we should call it the "BrokenHalo" question in honour of the first person in the history of the universe to ever ask it.
As for why, well the answer is because people want or need to run software that is only available for Windows, an increasing amount of which over the next few years will only run on {Microsoft's latest version of Windows}.
That's probably the majority answer, but you should probably be told that some Mac users prefer Windows to Mac OS X. They're a minority, but they do exist. They like the Apple hardware or something, but just feel more comfortable with the way Windows works. (I'm kind of the opposite, I hate the hardware but love the software, but I'm in a minority too.)
Good story, and it reminds me of another story, involving - interestingly enough - Christopher Columbus again.
In the story, Christopher Columbus attends a meeting involving Craig McCaw, Christopher Gent, Steve Jobs, and the entire staff of Nokia. Christopher asks all the people in attendance to design an easier way of entering text messages into a cellphone. After all those present have tried and failed, they state that it's impossible to get better than iTAP. Columbus then pulls out a whopping great IBM Model M keyboard, attaches it to his phone, and types in his text message. Columbus then states that it is "the simplest thing in the world. Anybody can do it, after he has been shown how!"
Columbus then went on to patent his invention, but in one of the great tragedies of science and technology, received nothing in royalties due to the slight issue with his "solution" being as idiotic as his more famous attempt to stand an egg on end.
at&t have said they will not do it for a specific period of time, to help smooth over the BellSouth deal. They are one of the chief opponents of NN, and it was comments by their CEO that caused the controversy in the first place.
Not that I'm necessarily pro-NN, at least not in terms of laws mandating it.
1. Attack DRM. Consequences for FOSS? Slithe says it'll set it back 5-10 years (probably hyperbole. What is the basis of the logic? I've yet to see any.)
2. Don't attack DRM. Consequences for FOSS? Effectively made impractical. Sets it back permanently.
Here's the thing: most people don't realise that the practical option is usually the one that protects the ideology. Linus "learned" (actually, he didn't, he acts like a whining two year old about it to this day) this lesson with the BitKeeper fiasco. Most of us have learned this at some point in our lives. But there are still people, yourself included, who use the word "practical" as if it contradicts "ideological", as if the ideology has no basis in reason to begin with.
You can't make more free software by making it less free.
That's right, because a revolution is when something more than doubles in size. For example, in the French revolution, France was just a few square kilometers in size, but it became the major country it is today thanks to the revolution.
Seriously, since when has "The same, just more of it" (as with the Wii's major rivals) been revolutionary? When has a radical reconfiguration of what you have to make things possible that weren't before not been revolutionary?
I have an old Beige G3, which even with the original 300MHz CPU and worse-than-useless "Rage Pro", ran Jaguar with acceptable speed, on a 1024x768 screen. With the Apple phone, we're looking at a lower resolution screen, and presumably Apple has been able to make a lot more assumptions about the hardware that it can't when it comes to desktop operating systems.
People over-estimate the requirements of Mac OS X because they forget the apparent "slowness" of much of it isn't the hardware, it's the animation. Of course an OS will not feel as responsive as others if everytime it puts up a requestor, the requestor has to slide down, or flap down, from the top of the window. It's not the work spent on doing the animation, merely the second or so the animation is shown for, holding up the progression of the operation the user wants to do, that annoys the user and makes the user believe the OS is "slow".
This indeed was part of what made Panther feel much faster than Jaguar. Yes, they'd accelerated the back-end too, but many of the animations were just reworked to be quicker.
Every Mac OS X installation CD, which is mostly packages, contains a stripped down OS X to perform the installation. There's no doubt in my mind that Apple can strip down OS X to be a leaner, faster, operating system. The hardware they've described is certainly more than capable of running such a system. I seriously doubt they're making it up.
I thought the subject sounded somewhat exaggerated and more like Apple apologia.
I'm pretty sure Apple ported OS X for the same reason as Microsoft ported Windows CE. It was their OS. They have complete freedom to do as they wish with it. It's a good platform. Why the hell not?
As for porting open source efforts, as Motorola has done, again you're no longer tied to a third party (I say "no longer", but then I don't recall Motorola ever making a Symbian phone...), you have a robust, well known, platform with strong mindshare already, and you have no royalties to pay.
Not exactly a situation where anyone "hates" Symbian, secretly or otherwise, more a situation where certain platforms work out better for certain companies.
Slashdot Mirror
I would imagine that straight ports from one to the other are difficult enough without licensing issues, so I doubt that's a major issue for Sun.
A few years ago, Sun bought the right to relicense, royalty free, all the drivers in SCO Unix. As a result, they already have a well established base of drivers. And if they need to "look over the shoulder" of another operating system to see how to build support for a driver they have missed, all three *BSDs are extremely well supported in hardware terms, often using drivers that fit the principles of the underlying OS far better than Linux does (the ipw3945 driver would be a very obvious example.)
I don't think you're missing anything, I think the author has confused a number of concepts.
SunOS is the Solaris kernel. Remove the Solaris userland, replace it with GNU, and you have an operating system that has some of Unix (some of the kernel - interestingly, a lot of it is SCO code... no licensing disputes though, Sun bought the rights from SCO, somewhat controvertially, a year or two ago) and mostly GNU.
Whether you need to is another matter. For the most part, I suspect most people (including Sun) will replace Solaris components with GNU ones on a case-by-case basis, as long as the operating system in totality is Free Software, there's no good reason not to choose the right tool for the job.
The GPL3 is not the same license as the majority because it hasn't been released yet. There is no other reason. Nobody has rejected it because there is nothing to reject.
The entire process is being driven by consensus. The DRM stuff is in there because regardless of the views of a vocal minority, most people interested in Free Software are well aware that software is not free if someone can simply define it as an "Access Control Mechanism" and then use the DMCA to tear apart anyone who changes that code in a way they don't like. The "signatures" thing is in there because regardless of the views of a vocal minority, most people interested in Free Software are well aware that software you cannot use in any modified form except those signed-off by a hardware manufacturer is not free.
And I might hazard a guess that the primary reason why Torvalds is being to vocal in winging about both of the above has to do with the amount of work he'd need to do to change the license in the first place, given his lack of forethought in neither adopting the "or later version" clause, or any alternative that would make it easy to upgrade the license to one similar in spirit without the active support of every single person who has ever made a "contribution", no matter how small, to the Linux kernel.
Either way, I'm not seeing much evidence that, outside of the Linux kernel, there's much rejection of GPL3 at all. And I am seeing much of the Free Software community who rejected GPL2 seeing GPL3 as a much better alternative. That's the aim, after all, to try to get a license that suits almost everyone who believes in Copyleft, and to end the current, insane, license forking that causes so much damage.
Yeah, clearly those parents named the child after a future middle eastern dictator they planned to admire when he became famous enough for them ot have heard of him. Did they invent time travel perchance? Is that your position?
In other news, my child will be called Ebeneezer Grunten McHaboloy, after the infamous President Charles Grunten, who took over America in 2020 and slaughtered the first born in every county for no reason whatsoever.
I'm not sure I agree with either the notion it was supposed to be for web browsers, or that it taking over from COBOL was unexpected.
Java was originally promoted as being from a project to effectively replace languages like FORTH for embedded applications. However, while this may have had some nominal truth to it, it was clear from the outset that it was actually a general purpose language intended to fix the major issues with modern programming languages that had tripped up most software designs since the 1970s.
Java taking over from COBOL, in that respect, is entirely expected in every way except the usual "But will people latch on to it" type thing. (ie Mac OS X or GNU/Linux could take over from Windows, functionality-wise they're well suited to do it, but would people actually make the move?) It's a clean programming language that fixes the major issues that C and C++ suffer from, and as such is a decent successor to old standbys that were being kept around largely because C derived languages were just plain dangerous. (Do you really want a whole bunch of banking transactions screwed up because of an undetected out-of-bounds error or worse?)
The really interesting thing now is to see whether Java's Free Software status will be enough for people to feel comfortable actually integrating it into operating systems. With the majority of new platforms being Free Software, it's been hard to do until now. That could change, and we might actually see it taking over from C++, something it's been close to doing for a while but not quite getting there.
Oh! Ok, I honestly thought it was stuck in permanent beta status (when I was troubleshooting this I went to Aerith's getting started page, which has a link to Mustang, which talks about snapshot releases and says no more work is going be done on it because of the open source Java 7 project. That'll teach me not to check further. Heh.)
Because Java has more to do on a desktop than on a mobile phone. Typical mobile phone firmware is less than a megabyte. Now compare that to, say, Mac OS X's /System directory. And in order to be useful, at the very least Java has to abstract (make available to Java programs) the majority of the useful capabilities of the underlying OS.
In some ways, given Java is doing a great deal to fix the flaws of the underlying OS at the same time as provide access to it, it's surprising that in today's multi-gigabyte OS world, it's still so small.
If you were to implement a version of Java for AmigaOS, containing only the features that AmigaOS supports (ie, AWT uses Gadtools and Intuition, no networking, HTML, or XML, etc) I'd be surprised if it ended up being more than a megabyte in size.
You make a good point. Back in 1976, when 128G was a huge amount of memory, it was foolishly insane to run StarOffice under Microsoft Vista Executive. It was much more sensible to run Microsoft Office, which Microsoft wisely first wrote in Python in 1966, under something like OpenBSD.
(Not only was StarOffice not written in Java, and had no links to Java in the time frame you're talking about, it still contains relatively small amounts of Java. Java has nothing to do with StarOffice's bloat, SO's a standard C++ application, and in addition to the usual problems with bloat and early OOPS applications, also incorporated a lot of things then that were a legacy of the poor application frameworks available for Unix at the time. For example, it contained an entire themable widget system, because the Unix world couldn't really settle on a standard widget set. Motif was proprietary. Athena was crude. OpenWindows was considered obsolete and too experimental (nice system though.) OpenStep was only available for a handful of platforms. etc. etc.)
I just had the same problem. Turns out that Aerith requires Java 6, which isn't an officially released version of Java yet, and running it under Java 5 causes a crash because it can't find java.awt.LinearGradientPaint.
Given it's still beta software, I think they can be forgiven for not putting in all the version checks that would have created a more useful error message, but it's still a little disappointing.
He's not against DRM. Mac OS X is protected with it (the Intel version has certain binaries such as Dock.app "protected" in this way using encryption and the TPM chip.) He's also spoken approvingly of DRM on Bluray.
He just appears to dislike it when it comes to music. And, to be honest, with Apple's absolutely hysterical comments in the past concerning, for example, France's attempts to outlaw DRM, I honestly think this is a new position, based upon forthcoming events, not because of pressure from Europe meaning Jobs feels like he can say what he always wanted to say really.
Quite honestly, the notion Steve Jobs has always been against DRM makes no sense whatsoever. There's no evidence for it, and there's plenty of evidence against it.
This would be relevent if we were talking about the situation right now, rather than the near future. However, we're not. What we're talking about here are the consequences of mobile phones developing further functionality, coupled with the further integration of DRM into Vista. The former is happening now. The latter is going to become an issue as 90% of computers become bundled with the Vista operating system.
Seriously, wake up. Your entire comment looks like a knee-jerk defense of Apple's future. Cellphones have obliterated the PDA market, they're already making in-roads on the digital camera front, and they're going to do the same for MP3 players. Steve Jobs "gets it". Not only does he know its going to happen, but he's getting Apple to ride that wave. And regardless of whether you agree with me, and agree with him, this is Apple's stance, so it's relevent to why Jobs wrote what he did. Back in July of last year, it even became their official position. To quote Peter Oppenheimer:
So two things are going to happen: the most widespread DRM in the world will be Microsoft's, with users of other platforms (such as Macintosh) frozen out of an increasingly large amount of content; and Apple's lack of hardware marketshare will mean iTS will be all but irrelevent.
That's what's going to happen. That's what Steve Jobs is trying to deal with.
Perhaps because you have one computer, and do not particularly want to reboot every time you switch between doing something in your must-have Vista application, and doing something in your Mac environment?
Personally, I hate dual booting. I hate rebooting, period.
I covered this in my journal but I'll say it here too:
The issue is that the landscape has changed. The iTS and iPod exist in a symbiotic relationship where the strength of one strengthens the other. But that's about to come to an end. MP3 playing mobile phones are becoming more and more viable, with flash memory plummeting in price and the carriers themselves seeing OTA music sales as a great way to make use of their under-utilized Internet services. People don't like having to carry multiple devices around, and the convenience factor of a device that is a music store and mobile music player in one is going to, ultimately, trump the iPod. Right now, Apple's saving grace is the relative incompetence of most of the mobile phone makers, they can't rely upon that forever.
This is one side of the deal. They could have dealt with that by producing a viable mobile iTunes player and licensing it, or by dominating the mobile phone market, but what they've actually decided to do is enter the mobile phone market as a niche player. This makes them a competitor to all the other manufacturers, who are unlikely to license any kind of "mobile iTunes", and also means they'll never get a substantial market share of the new market in the same way that they did the iPod. One can make all kinds of guesses as to why they've decided to do this, but the bottom line is that Apple's days as the #1 seller of MP3 playing hardware are numbered.
The other is Vista. Vista has upped the ante in terms of DRM available. Mac users will be locked out of the content that will be available under Vista's DRM, and those chosing to publish content under a DRM scheme will see Vista's, as the one available to the most number of people, as being the one to go for.
It is no longer in Apple's best long term interests to promote DRM. In fact, DRM is likely to bite it to a point that its own platform may well no longer be viable within a few years.
Apple has, at least, dealt with that in one way: their computers, if push comes to shove, are capable of running Windows, and if it becomes a really serious issue, Apple could migrate to a Windows based platform. This would be the end of them as a company with control over their own platform, and would make them another Boutique computer maker like Lenovo and Sony. So naturally it's not where they want to go.
So I honestly believe Jobs is sincere when he claims to dislike DRM. He does... now that it's looking like it'll be a serious problem for Apple in the future. A successful DRM scheme from a competitor could well destroy Apple's position as an independent computer maker, making them beholden to that competitor and its interests. Such a situation has not been as realistic in the past as it is today.
One more thing: If Vista's DRM starts to take off, it may be time for Apple to take the gloves off with respect to Mac OS X market share. I'll leave you to speculate as to what they could do to make that happen.
He said non-DRMed, not non-profit.
KDE?
I understood his analogy as being that nothing Ford does will make a car (using a conventional design) drive to Hawaii. Similarly, nothing Microsoft does will make DRM (using a TPM based system) work on a VM. It's an issue of technical possibilities.
Of course, my Lotus will drive to Hawaii, but Q never likes it when I do that.
So is a U-Haul truck a "luxury vehicle" then?
Wow, yes, I do believe it's the first time anyone's ever questioned why someone would want Vista. Nobody in the history of "running Microsoft operating systems on computers that generally run some other OS" has ever asked the question "Why would anyone ever run {Microsoft's latest version of Windows}" to the best of my knowledge. It's a completely new and original question, and I believe we should call it the "BrokenHalo" question in honour of the first person in the history of the universe to ever ask it.
As for why, well the answer is because people want or need to run software that is only available for Windows, an increasing amount of which over the next few years will only run on {Microsoft's latest version of Windows}.
That's probably the majority answer, but you should probably be told that some Mac users prefer Windows to Mac OS X. They're a minority, but they do exist. They like the Apple hardware or something, but just feel more comfortable with the way Windows works. (I'm kind of the opposite, I hate the hardware but love the software, but I'm in a minority too.)
Good story, and it reminds me of another story, involving - interestingly enough - Christopher Columbus again.
It's a sad story, I know.
at&t have said they will not do it for a specific period of time, to help smooth over the BellSouth deal. They are one of the chief opponents of NN, and it was comments by their CEO that caused the controversy in the first place.
Not that I'm necessarily pro-NN, at least not in terms of laws mandating it.
Available options:
1. Attack DRM. Consequences for FOSS? Slithe says it'll set it back 5-10 years (probably hyperbole. What is the basis of the logic? I've yet to see any.)
2. Don't attack DRM. Consequences for FOSS? Effectively made impractical. Sets it back permanently.
Here's the thing: most people don't realise that the practical option is usually the one that protects the ideology. Linus "learned" (actually, he didn't, he acts like a whining two year old about it to this day) this lesson with the BitKeeper fiasco. Most of us have learned this at some point in our lives. But there are still people, yourself included, who use the word "practical" as if it contradicts "ideological", as if the ideology has no basis in reason to begin with.
You can't make more free software by making it less free.
That's right, because a revolution is when something more than doubles in size. For example, in the French revolution, France was just a few square kilometers in size, but it became the major country it is today thanks to the revolution.
Seriously, since when has "The same, just more of it" (as with the Wii's major rivals) been revolutionary? When has a radical reconfiguration of what you have to make things possible that weren't before not been revolutionary?
I have an old Beige G3, which even with the original 300MHz CPU and worse-than-useless "Rage Pro", ran Jaguar with acceptable speed, on a 1024x768 screen. With the Apple phone, we're looking at a lower resolution screen, and presumably Apple has been able to make a lot more assumptions about the hardware that it can't when it comes to desktop operating systems.
People over-estimate the requirements of Mac OS X because they forget the apparent "slowness" of much of it isn't the hardware, it's the animation. Of course an OS will not feel as responsive as others if everytime it puts up a requestor, the requestor has to slide down, or flap down, from the top of the window. It's not the work spent on doing the animation, merely the second or so the animation is shown for, holding up the progression of the operation the user wants to do, that annoys the user and makes the user believe the OS is "slow".
This indeed was part of what made Panther feel much faster than Jaguar. Yes, they'd accelerated the back-end too, but many of the animations were just reworked to be quicker.
Every Mac OS X installation CD, which is mostly packages, contains a stripped down OS X to perform the installation. There's no doubt in my mind that Apple can strip down OS X to be a leaner, faster, operating system. The hardware they've described is certainly more than capable of running such a system. I seriously doubt they're making it up.
I thought the subject sounded somewhat exaggerated and more like Apple apologia.
I'm pretty sure Apple ported OS X for the same reason as Microsoft ported Windows CE. It was their OS. They have complete freedom to do as they wish with it. It's a good platform. Why the hell not?
As for porting open source efforts, as Motorola has done, again you're no longer tied to a third party (I say "no longer", but then I don't recall Motorola ever making a Symbian phone...), you have a robust, well known, platform with strong mindshare already, and you have no royalties to pay.
Not exactly a situation where anyone "hates" Symbian, secretly or otherwise, more a situation where certain platforms work out better for certain companies.
Not unless Apple tries to pull the same stunt, no.