I highly recommend Redhat (the Personal versions will work, go for Pro if you need support); its documentation for what you described is great. Redhat is very easy to install and is nicely tweaked to be a small-office server "out of the box". The documentation is very concise, and shows the easy way to do things ( configuring samba ), while giving you an understanding of whats going on. See the Reference guide for documentation on email and ldap.
I think a lot of people have a revolutionary business model in mind for record companies and wonder why the "idiot music execs" don't see it. Well, here's mine:):
Record companies need to figure out how to sell mainstream CD's at $6. Some places to look to cut costs are outrageous celebrity and marketing expenses, and management size/salaries. $16 for even the best hour of music in the world seems like a lot to me; I think it's hard for many people to justify spending that much when they can download the music free (plus the expense of time & quality). Complete modern and popular albums that are playable on computers at a *reasonable* price could compete with online trading.
You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of the.NET Framework component of the OS Components to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval.
On this topic, Richard M. Stallman responds to the following question in this LWN interview.
Some companies have adopted a hybrid business model where proprietary software products are used to help fund free software development. In your view, is this an appropriate way to raise the money to pay for free software projects?
Many venders with lowest prices on PriceWatch, provide either bad or fraudulent service. Choose a reputable site with credentials (newegg.com) or your local retailer to get your prices and merchandise. The best place to check out a online business is various consumer review sites by typing in the company's name into Google (sample link to review of vender w/the $120 price on the HD). Pay particular attention to the most recent comments when reviewing a company.
The source-code for most software is *huge*. In Redhat 8, the included (compressed) source-code takes 3 cds, more than double the size of the binaries. Considering Redhat is composed of mostly non-redundant code that's designed for redistribution, its source is probably much smaller that of most proprietary software, where programmers regularly copy, paste and modify modules for their needs and not care that they have to redistribute 15 versions of the same module for compatibility. I read an article about the build for Microsoft Windows, which indicated the complete source code weighed in at 50 gigs. I expect that the Windows source is an extream example of how bloated and redundant messy code can get, however, I'd imagine that the source for many complex pieces of proprietary software would span multiple CDs. The extra CDs would make packaging more complex and expensive and could confuse users. CDs aren't expensive, but I believe that the Redhat packaging (for example) would a lot nicer if (purely form a its-annoying-to-deal-with-that-many-cds perspective) it were 1 CD instead of 5.
Personally, I like having the source code, and I'm willing to deal with 5 Redhat CDs (I did need to copy them to my hard drive to use them sanely). However, its not very practical for use for many (most?) users and many (most?) software makers to package and distribute their source code with their product *even if they wanted to*.
Would you rather they simply post an "Ask Slashdot?". Would you want a group considering adopting DRM technologies to only hear speakers advocating DRM, or would you want anti-DRM speakers to be heard as well?
This is a bit OT, but/. has some of the most insightful, to-the-point, easy to read commentary anywhere. Despite the nay-sayers, I've found that Slashdot has fairly balanced discussion (however, I can't say the same thing about the posted stories). One of the best and most efficient ways of exploring topics that I know and care about is reading the moterated comments about them on Slashdot. Hey, if a Gov't wants to make decisions on Information Technology issues by posting to "Ask Slashdot", I'm for it.
The article addressed the future of polygons (more passes for bump maps and cool lighting effects)...
The current state of realtime-3d is about the same as it was about Quake-1 time. There are more tricks, faster processors, but its still a static world, with limited number of moving polygons. For instance, the detailed and breathtaking city in GTA3 is entirely pre-rendered and static, however to great effect. There is so much potential; arbitrary building damage is currently impossible (except for cheesy texture changes; bump mapping and increasing the # of passes as described in the article might improve the current effects, but won't solve the underlying problem). There is a whole airport of apparently damage- roof uber-titanium-based airplanes in the airport of GTA3 because the majority of the models are completely static. You won't see a modern game with a Hollywood style real-time earthquake or other amazing affects..they can partially be created using tricks, but truely arbitrary realtime manipulation and destruction isn't obtained using the current hardware/software.
The far-future of 3d-gaming is a truly dynamic world, where the game can control every polygon in real-time! The sorts of effects I'm talking about are currently being used my movie studios at hours per-frame...
Netscape/Timewarner/AOL really needs to market their strengths, and they have quite a few. Here are some ideas to turn around AOL:
Market Single Sign-On. AOL has an amazing (the largest) subscriber base, from AOL to AIM to ICQ to Netscape. Banner should ads *everywhere*, and make a decent developer site w/sample code and sell subscriptions like mad. There should be dummy simple easy to install SDKs for ActiveX, DotNet, Linux et al and preferably make the source available (for the press).
Figure out how to make money with Netscape (good luck). Seriously, AOL should market it as a client development platform. XUL can make some pretty amazing client-side apps and there should be sample code galore (on that developer's site) on how easy it is to make full fledged applications from HTML && Javascript. Make an extremely light XUL runtime that can be installed quickly and independently of Mozilla.
Give people a reason to subscribe to AOL. Ad-based services should start at $11/month, Ad-free service should be available for people at $25 or whatever. AOL should eat it if they have to.
Whatever AOL does, it should not restrict new AIM subscriptions or current service; as it is, its an excellent marketing and growth opportunity. (see single-signon)
Remove the general webbrowser from the AOL client software. All general webbrowsing should be done using the client's preferred web browser. Reserve the AOL client for exclusive AOL/TW content, messaging and email.
Give users a reason to want that AOL client. Make it lean, extremely fast and/or make the source available. Keep the current client proprietary for people who subscribe to the ad-based service.
Make a very expensive (hundreds / thousands of dollars) user-friendly encoder and media server for NSV. NSV is a (almost) patent-issue free streaming file format. Make NSV use OGG instead of MP3, btw to avoid patent issues.
Announce a big partnership w/Sun or IBM dealing w/something marketable.
This may be OT, but what good is a cool cellular device if you can't use it most places? T-mobile's coverage is pathetic. If you look at their coverage map, you'll see a broken spider web of purple blotches across the US. Their website doesn't make it very clear that their service offers *no* coverage outside these splotches. If I go out of town w/a T-Mobile phone or neato Sidekick, its highly likely that I won't be able to call for help or SSH into my box in an emergency:(
I've heard this argument before..that other venders are lazy and should just follow the MS docs and register themselves. However, the link you provided is extreamly obscure and difficult to find unless one happens to know the term "Registering Programs with Client Types". There is very little information on Microsoft site linking the "Program Access and Defaults" dialog to that documentation. Its gotten easier to find recently, but was extremly hard to find around the time that Win2k/SP3 came out.
Opera and the others have apparently not taken the time to create new install packages.
It's my opinion that MS intentionally made the link public, yet hard to find so that competitors would fail to implement it. Alternatively, maybe Opera didn't bother because they saw that "Set Program Access and Defaults" was designed to be a simple mechanism to change back to MS middlewear. Or maybe Opera doesn't want to bother with it because they realised that IE6 SP1 overrides the users settings for program defaults and "Show this Program"!
I think DRM in free software is a good idea. For example, one might implement a header in OGG that said "no streaming allowed" because the Copyright holder does not want their song to be streamed w/o payment. If players respect this header, this benefits the author and the user (in my case, I tend to respect other people's property and pay up where payment is due). If users want to steal, they'll try (and probably succeed) to so do no matter what sort DRM is exposed.
Proprietary DRM often misleads Copyright holders into thinking that they can control their content on un-trusted computers, when what they really need is a standard, electronic way of expressing their permissions on software.
I'd expect that a Free Software DRM would be a bit more sophisticated then the above example. It would be cool if it implemented a standard document type (along the lines of P3P) with options to accommodate a variety of licenses; from GPL to donation-ware to media-type licenses to draconian licenses. There would be quite a lot of problems to solve (where to store the licensing data, an API to expose such a licensing interface, how to handle source redistribution etc.) Handling licensing exceptions would be another interesting issue, going back to the OGG example, if they copyright holder wanted to allow people to pay to get permission to stream w/o making the purchaser download a different version of the file or having to circumvent the protection. Any implementation would ultimately leave final word in the hands of the user (no number of permission bits will prevent someone from modifying the software (proprietary or not) or pointing a camera to the monitor.
Of course free DRM would preferably encourage people to use it for enforcing free-type licenses!
The new "Set Program Access and Defaults" dialog is a thinly disguised mechanism to allow users to easily change back to Microsoft's components all in one convenient location.
According to this, Windows 2000 will be a unsupported product on March 31, 2004. (Unsupported = No hotfixes, no security fixes.)
Note that the link above doesn't say it directly; specifically they say that Windows 2000 will be entering "Extended phase" on March 31, 2003 and elsewhere they mention that Non-supported occurs a year after extended phase.
Also, that article only applies to Windows Desktop products. They haven't made any promises about Win2k server.
I have a Palm, a TI-86 and capable calculator software for my Palm. I carry my Palm around all the time, but would never attempt to use it for any calculations, simple or not. The form factor of Palms make them useless for data entry. The Palm is limited to grafiti and pecking with the stylus...either way, it takes two hands, and is clumsy and slow compared to the keypad on the TI-86. The Palm makes a passable calculator with my attached keyboard, but by itself, it just isn't very useful as a calculator.
As a note, with a keyboard, my Palm is a great tool for school; I can take notes all day...it would be nice if there was good free graphing calculator software that can replace the funcationality of the TI-86/89.
I thought RedHat's stable, production level releases all were *.2 (i don't remember a 6.3, and 6.2 was the release for a while). Is this considered a stable release that can be used in production systems?
The 7.3 version number indicates that the release is a incremental upgrade from (the excellent Redhat 7.2), w/o major feature changes.
It's my understanding that Redhat considers all their numbered non-beta releases to be stable and production ready. Their 7.0 release had some major component upgrades which gave their x.0 releases a bad wrap for some people, however, the issues (with GCC, security fixes) were fixed timely in the form of downloadable upgrades. The 7.x series has been great and rock-solid on the desktop (I've been using 7.1 and 7.2 as my desktop at home), and I'm looking forward to trying 7.3.
Would anyone care if "Longhorn" did not come? What if Microsoft's "dream" was unfufilled? How would it affect the world if Microsoft's new operating system had to be scrapped because of the anti-trust litigation? All that new code for Digital Rights Managment, an Amazing database file system, and the usual plethera of new bug fixes that won't be back-ported, was stopped cold and thrown into the intellectual property vault forever. Who cares?
It would not matter. The general public won't be disappointed; they don't know what Longhorn is (do you?). Some Microsoft execs and investers will be screwed. Some Microsoft execs will have destroyed dreams (the googly eyed marketing guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs). What if Windows XP were to never be? WinME? Win95?
The x86 computer industry would do just fine without the Microsoft solution. There are plenty of operating systems to choose from that will do Microsoft's job well.
First of all, I can't believe how unbelievably childish Microsoft is being. It seems that the whole purpose to their licenses now a days is not to protect their property or spell out the terms under which to use it, but instead to simply attack GNU. This sort of behavior has positive effect other than alienating and pissing off people and companies (some their business partners ie. IBM) that have adopted GPL/LGPL licensed software for part of their business strategies. They could have just as easily worded their license in a way protect their precious (crap) intellectual property without the mudslinging. NDA's aren't a new idea.
quoth the license:
3.3 IPR Impairing License Restrictions. [...] Company shall not distribute any Company Implementation in any manner that would subject such Company Implementation to the terms of an IPR Impairing License. [where "a IPR impairing license" is specifically defined as the GNU LGPL/GPL earlier]
Secondly, this clause does not premit software licensed under a BSD-type license. Any license that is GPL/LGPL compatible is banned including BSD/Artistic/X11, because they "would subject such Company Implementation to the terms of an IPR Impairing License". According to MS's license, the license for a "Company Implementation"'s software would basically have to include the same "IPR Impairing License" clause specifically banning GNU GPL/LGPL.
Freely distributable Propritary Crap?
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
Your company wants to combine GPL'd code with their project and comply with the GPL by distributing your company's (intentionally) obfuscated code.
I'm surprised that many of the other provisions of the GPL don't bother your company. What about the fact that
the GPL guarantee's the recipient's right to redistribute the binaries and source code freely. Would your company be willing to sell its code under a license (GPL) that guarantees that your clients can reverse engineer (your obfuscated code), distribute and sell original or modified versions of your programs free of charge?
If I were an OEM, I could install both Linux and Windows on the same machine, and be able to offer my customers a simple multi-boot solution without having to modify the boot sector at all. It's called a boot disk. Insert this disk when you want to boot to Linux. The disk contains nothing more than SysLinux, which is set up to boot the linux partition off of the harddrive. There, OEM License problem is solved.
The OEM Licensing agreement you are refering to is considered a trade secret. NOBODY but the legal teams at the OEMS are allowed to read it. Your idea assumes that the licensing agreement doesn't explicitly exclude the "loophole" you described.
Okay, giving your idea the benefit of the doubt, Microsoft's OEM licensing agreements are contingent on the whim of Microsoft. If an OEM, and I'm not talking about Joe OEM, I'm talking about the big names, Gateway, Compaq, Dell, even look at Microsoft crosseyed, Microsoft may yoink their OEM license agreement, which would subsequently mean immediate death to said OEM. They can't afford to sell computers if they aquire Windows at a retail price. This means that Microsoft has a lot of leverage outside of their exclusionary licensing agreement that does not leave a lot of room for OEMs to be "creative".
This topic is what Be's complaint is about. When Compaq announced that they were going to market a Internet Applicance running Be's BeIA, well, read this quote from Be's complaint:
51. In October 1998, however, Compaq informed Be that it had disclosed information
about the Be Internet appliance project to Microsoft. Later that same month, Microsoft Chairman
Bill Gates visited Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer as part of a "Digital Appliances Review."
52. In early November, under pressure from Microsoft, Compaq informed Be that it
was no longer interested in licensing BeOS.
Microsoft used monopoly illegaly (tried and convicted by the highest appeals court). Their control over OEMs extends past their written contracts.
Be's complaint states that Microsoft used their desktop monopoly to kill Be's internet applicance market.
45. Microsoft attempted to prevent the Internet appliance from developing into a fully
functional platform that might compete with Windows-based Intel-compatible PCs by means of a
strategy it referred to internally as "embrace, ex tend, extinguish." According to this strategy,
Microsoft publicly embraced industry-standard cross-platform protocols and programming
languages, such as Hypertext Markup Language ("HTML") and Sun's Java. It then extended
those standards, often subtly or secretly, when implementing them in its own products such as the
Internet Explorer browser, so that applications and Internet content created according to the
standards as extended by Microsoft would only work with Windows or Windows-based
browsers. The resulting fragmentation of the extended standards eventually resulted in those
standards becoming extinguished as tools for easily developing cross-platform applications and
content. This further reinforced the applications barrier to entry, and with it, Windows's
dominant position in its own market.
I totally agree with Be's case. I think that Microsoft abused their monopoly to push Be out of business before Be could possibly get a foothold.
Practices that the parent calls "anti-competitive" are actually normal, competitive, well founded and quite the opposite of "anti-competitive", rather they *are* very much so competitive! I know the parent was just discussing the article's use of the term, however, what the article was referring to is much different.
Competition in a free market breeds monopolies, like the parent mentioned. Fortunately, over the many many years of experience of having a capitalist society, USA, Europe, and other regions have gained the wisdom that in order for a free market to be successful, it must be as competitive as possible. They found that large companies, leveraging monopoly power, could actually hurt competition and weaken the free market. This insight lead to legislation that broke up Bell, which is why you are now *allowed* to install your own phone jack (and not have to hire Bell to do it for you), you actually choice of brands of telephones you can own (your option is no longer only a set labeled "Property of Ma Bell") and can even choose your long distance carrier in a now very competitive market! Telephones are comparatively bland and uninteresting compared to the computer desktop market. Software is art that gets work done. Its not merely a tool, its an abstraction of a whole lot of (finate) complexity. Increased competition in the desktop market would be extreamly interesting and much more likely if it were not for Microsoft's top secret anti-competitive OEM license. Read the article if you haven't allready!
As soon as I noticed this article, I tried msn.com in every web browser I had in front of me, that is, IE5.5, Mozilla (0.9.5) and Netscape 4.7. Of course, msn.com gave that error message that is getting so many hits today to my Mozilla attempt. However, I noticed several display problems with Netscape 4.7; the "Windows XP" logo was broken and there were some other minor display problems. I saved the page to a file and opened up the file in IE. Surprisingly, the same broken Windows XP logo and other display problems persisted in IE. That, (not to mention the extremely prolonged render time in NS4.7) indicates to me that some Microsoft programmers were not discouraged by Microsoft to have a little fun breaking the page in Netscape.
Somebody please try it and post results/screenshots on a webserver so everyone can see!
Slashdot Mirror
I highly recommend Redhat (the Personal versions will work, go for Pro if you need support); its documentation for what you described is great. Redhat is very easy to install and is nicely tweaked to be a small-office server "out of the box". The documentation is very concise, and shows the easy way to do things ( configuring samba ), while giving you an understanding of whats going on. See the Reference guide for documentation on email and ldap.
Mosfet, creator of many things Unix-wise, well known for his KDE work, wrote this article about file system structure in 2001.
I think a lot of people have a revolutionary business model in mind for record companies and wonder why the "idiot music execs" don't see it. Well, here's mine :) :
Record companies need to figure out how to sell mainstream CD's at $6. Some places to look to cut costs are outrageous celebrity and marketing expenses, and management size/salaries. $16 for even the best hour of music in the world seems like a lot to me; I think it's hard for many people to justify spending that much when they can download the music free (plus the expense of time & quality). Complete modern and popular albums that are playable on computers at a *reasonable* price could compete with online trading.
- DotNet Framework Runtime EULA
Many venders with lowest prices on PriceWatch, provide either bad or fraudulent service. Choose a reputable site with credentials (newegg.com) or your local retailer to get your prices and merchandise. The best place to check out a online business is various consumer review sites by typing in the company's name into Google (sample link to review of vender w/the $120 price on the HD). Pay particular attention to the most recent comments when reviewing a company.
1. Anti-compete clause naming specific companies not to offer software or hardware from (Sun, Redhat, Corel)
2.Terms requiring the school to purchase Microsoft software for every computer they purchase
3.A clause that specifically precludes any use of software with "identified licenses"
4. Required promotions for new Microsoft products by Microsoft sales and marketing representatives
5.All faculty must use Powerpoint to distribute class materials, no matter what.
The source-code for most software is *huge*. In Redhat 8, the included (compressed) source-code takes 3 cds, more than double the size of the binaries. Considering Redhat is composed of mostly non-redundant code that's designed for redistribution, its source is probably much smaller that of most proprietary software, where programmers regularly copy, paste and modify modules for their needs and not care that they have to redistribute 15 versions of the same module for compatibility. I read an article about the build for Microsoft Windows, which indicated the complete source code weighed in at 50 gigs. I expect that the Windows source is an extream example of how bloated and redundant messy code can get, however, I'd imagine that the source for many complex pieces of proprietary software would span multiple CDs. The extra CDs would make packaging more complex and expensive and could confuse users. CDs aren't expensive, but I believe that the Redhat packaging (for example) would a lot nicer if (purely form a its-annoying-to-deal-with-that-many-cds perspective) it were 1 CD instead of 5.
Personally, I like having the source code, and I'm willing to deal with 5 Redhat CDs (I did need to copy them to my hard drive to use them sanely). However, its not very practical for use for many (most?) users and many (most?) software makers to package and distribute their source code with their product *even if they wanted to*.
Would you rather they simply post an "Ask Slashdot?". Would you want a group considering adopting DRM technologies to only hear speakers advocating DRM, or would you want anti-DRM speakers to be heard as well?
This is a bit OT, but /. has some of the most insightful, to-the-point, easy to read commentary anywhere. Despite the nay-sayers, I've found that Slashdot has fairly balanced discussion (however, I can't say the same thing about the posted stories). One of the best and most efficient ways of exploring topics that I know and care about is reading the moterated comments about them on Slashdot. Hey, if a Gov't wants to make decisions on Information Technology issues by posting to "Ask Slashdot", I'm for it.
The article addressed the future of polygons (more passes for bump maps and cool lighting effects)...
...
The current state of realtime-3d is about the same as it was about Quake-1 time. There are more tricks, faster processors, but its still a static world, with limited number of moving polygons. For instance, the detailed and breathtaking city in GTA3 is entirely pre-rendered and static, however to great effect. There is so much potential; arbitrary building damage is currently impossible (except for cheesy texture changes; bump mapping and increasing the # of passes as described in the article might improve the current effects, but won't solve the underlying problem). There is a whole airport of apparently damage- roof uber-titanium-based airplanes in the airport of GTA3 because the majority of the models are completely static. You won't see a modern game with a Hollywood style real-time earthquake or other amazing affects..they can partially be created using tricks, but truely arbitrary realtime manipulation and destruction isn't obtained using the current hardware/software.
The far-future of 3d-gaming is a truly dynamic world, where the game can control every polygon in real-time! The sorts of effects I'm talking about are currently being used my movie studios at hours per-frame
This may be OT, but what good is a cool cellular device if you can't use it most places? T-mobile's coverage is pathetic. If you look at their coverage map, you'll see a broken spider web of purple blotches across the US. Their website doesn't make it very clear that their service offers *no* coverage outside these splotches. If I go out of town w/a T-Mobile phone or neato Sidekick, its highly likely that I won't be able to call for help or SSH into my box in an emergency :(
I've heard this argument before..that other venders are lazy and should just follow the MS docs and register themselves. However, the link you provided is extreamly obscure and difficult to find unless one happens to know the term "Registering Programs with Client Types". There is very little information on Microsoft site linking the "Program Access and Defaults" dialog to that documentation. Its gotten easier to find recently, but was extremly hard to find around the time that Win2k/SP3 came out.
It's my opinion that MS intentionally made the link public, yet hard to find so that competitors would fail to implement it. Alternatively, maybe Opera didn't bother because they saw that "Set Program Access and Defaults" was designed to be a simple mechanism to change back to MS middlewear. Or maybe Opera doesn't want to bother with it because they realised that IE6 SP1 overrides the users settings for program defaults and "Show this Program"!
I think DRM in free software is a good idea. For example, one might implement a header in OGG that said "no streaming allowed" because the Copyright holder does not want their song to be streamed w/o payment. If players respect this header, this benefits the author and the user (in my case, I tend to respect other people's property and pay up where payment is due). If users want to steal, they'll try (and probably succeed) to so do no matter what sort DRM is exposed.
Proprietary DRM often misleads Copyright holders into thinking that they can control their content on un-trusted computers, when what they really need is a standard, electronic way of expressing their permissions on software.
I'd expect that a Free Software DRM would be a bit more sophisticated then the above example. It would be cool if it implemented a standard document type (along the lines of P3P) with options to accommodate a variety of licenses; from GPL to donation-ware to media-type licenses to draconian licenses. There would be quite a lot of problems to solve (where to store the licensing data, an API to expose such a licensing interface, how to handle source redistribution etc.) Handling licensing exceptions would be another interesting issue, going back to the OGG example, if they copyright holder wanted to allow people to pay to get permission to stream w/o making the purchaser download a different version of the file or having to circumvent the protection. Any implementation would ultimately leave final word in the hands of the user (no number of permission bits will prevent someone from modifying the software (proprietary or not) or pointing a camera to the monitor.
Of course free DRM would preferably encourage people to use it for enforcing free-type licenses!
The new "Set Program Access and Defaults" dialog is a thinly disguised mechanism to allow users to easily change back to Microsoft's components all in one convenient location.
According to this, Windows 2000 will be a unsupported product on March 31, 2004. (Unsupported = No hotfixes, no security fixes.)
Note that the link above doesn't say it directly; specifically they say that Windows 2000 will be entering "Extended phase" on March 31, 2003 and elsewhere they mention that Non-supported occurs a year after extended phase.
Also, that article only applies to Windows Desktop products. They haven't made any promises about Win2k server.
I have a Palm, a TI-86 and capable calculator software for my Palm. I carry my Palm around all the time, but would never attempt to use it for any calculations, simple or not. The form factor of Palms make them useless for data entry. The Palm is limited to grafiti and pecking with the stylus...either way, it takes two hands, and is clumsy and slow compared to the keypad on the TI-86. The Palm makes a passable calculator with my attached keyboard, but by itself, it just isn't very useful as a calculator.
As a note, with a keyboard, my Palm is a great tool for school; I can take notes all day...it would be nice if there was good free graphing calculator software that can replace the funcationality of the TI-86/89.
The 7.3 version number indicates that the release is a incremental upgrade from (the excellent Redhat 7.2), w/o major feature changes.
It's my understanding that Redhat considers all their numbered non-beta releases to be stable and production ready. Their 7.0 release had some major component upgrades which gave their x.0 releases a bad wrap for some people, however, the issues (with GCC, security fixes) were fixed timely in the form of downloadable upgrades. The 7.x series has been great and rock-solid on the desktop (I've been using 7.1 and 7.2 as my desktop at home), and I'm looking forward to trying 7.3.
Would anyone care if "Longhorn" did not come? What if Microsoft's "dream" was unfufilled? How would it affect the world if Microsoft's new operating system had to be scrapped because of the anti-trust litigation? All that new code for Digital Rights Managment, an Amazing database file system, and the usual plethera of new bug fixes that won't be back-ported, was stopped cold and thrown into the intellectual property vault forever. Who cares?
It would not matter. The general public won't be disappointed; they don't know what Longhorn is (do you?). Some Microsoft execs and investers will be screwed. Some Microsoft execs will have destroyed dreams (the googly eyed marketing guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs). What if Windows XP were to never be? WinME? Win95?
The x86 computer industry would do just fine without the Microsoft solution. There are plenty of operating systems to choose from that will do Microsoft's job well.
First of all, I can't believe how unbelievably childish Microsoft is being. It seems that the whole purpose to their licenses now a days is not to protect their property or spell out the terms under which to use it, but instead to simply attack GNU. This sort of behavior has positive effect other than alienating and pissing off people and companies (some their business partners ie. IBM) that have adopted GPL/LGPL licensed software for part of their business strategies. They could have just as easily worded their license in a way protect their precious (crap) intellectual property without the mudslinging. NDA's aren't a new idea.
quoth the license:
Secondly, this clause does not premit software licensed under a BSD-type license. Any license that is GPL/LGPL compatible is banned including BSD/Artistic/X11, because they "would subject such Company Implementation to the terms of an IPR Impairing License". According to MS's license, the license for a "Company Implementation"'s software would basically have to include the same "IPR Impairing License" clause specifically banning GNU GPL/LGPL.
Your company wants to combine GPL'd code with their project and comply with the GPL by distributing your company's (intentionally) obfuscated code.
I'm surprised that many of the other provisions of the GPL don't bother your company. What about the fact that the GPL guarantee's the recipient's right to redistribute the binaries and source code freely. Would your company be willing to sell its code under a license (GPL) that guarantees that your clients can reverse engineer (your obfuscated code), distribute and sell original or modified versions of your programs free of charge?
The OEM Licensing agreement you are refering to is considered a trade secret. NOBODY but the legal teams at the OEMS are allowed to read it. Your idea assumes that the licensing agreement doesn't explicitly exclude the "loophole" you described.
Okay, giving your idea the benefit of the doubt, Microsoft's OEM licensing agreements are contingent on the whim of Microsoft. If an OEM, and I'm not talking about Joe OEM, I'm talking about the big names, Gateway, Compaq, Dell, even look at Microsoft crosseyed, Microsoft may yoink their OEM license agreement, which would subsequently mean immediate death to said OEM. They can't afford to sell computers if they aquire Windows at a retail price. This means that Microsoft has a lot of leverage outside of their exclusionary licensing agreement that does not leave a lot of room for OEMs to be "creative".
This topic is what Be's complaint is about. When Compaq announced that they were going to market a Internet Applicance running Be's BeIA, well, read this quote from Be's complaint:
Microsoft used monopoly illegaly (tried and convicted by the highest appeals court). Their control over OEMs extends past their written contracts.
Practices that the parent calls "anti-competitive" are actually normal, competitive, well founded and quite the opposite of "anti-competitive", rather they *are* very much so competitive! I know the parent was just discussing the article's use of the term, however, what the article was referring to is much different.
Competition in a free market breeds monopolies, like the parent mentioned. Fortunately, over the many many years of experience of having a capitalist society, USA, Europe, and other regions have gained the wisdom that in order for a free market to be successful, it must be as competitive as possible. They found that large companies, leveraging monopoly power, could actually hurt competition and weaken the free market. This insight lead to legislation that broke up Bell, which is why you are now *allowed* to install your own phone jack (and not have to hire Bell to do it for you), you actually choice of brands of telephones you can own (your option is no longer only a set labeled "Property of Ma Bell") and can even choose your long distance carrier in a now very competitive market! Telephones are comparatively bland and uninteresting compared to the computer desktop market. Software is art that gets work done. Its not merely a tool, its an abstraction of a whole lot of (finate) complexity. Increased competition in the desktop market would be extreamly interesting and much more likely if it were not for Microsoft's top secret anti-competitive OEM license. Read the article if you haven't allready!
As soon as I noticed this article, I tried msn.com in every web browser I had in front of me, that is, IE5.5, Mozilla (0.9.5) and Netscape 4.7. Of course, msn.com gave that error message that is getting so many hits today to my Mozilla attempt. However, I noticed several display problems with Netscape 4.7; the "Windows XP" logo was broken and there were some other minor display problems. I saved the page to a file and opened up the file in IE. Surprisingly, the same broken Windows XP logo and other display problems persisted in IE. That, (not to mention the extremely prolonged render time in NS4.7) indicates to me that some Microsoft programmers were not discouraged by Microsoft to have a little fun breaking the page in Netscape.
Somebody please try it and post results/screenshots on a webserver so everyone can see!