Debian and SuSE are also very much opposed to the new XFree86 license change. When Red Hat and SuSE, the two biggest commercial distributions change and Debian in addition, the new default target for device drivers will be X.org, which will push other distributions forward, if the license issue is not enough by itself.
I'm willing to bet that X.org will be de facto standard X-implementation in under two years. There is just no good reasons not to (unless maybe if XFree86 changes their minds, but I feel the issues are deeper than that).
While this is certainly true, I can think of myself and lots of other people willing to take that loss in quality in order to not have to reencode their entire music collection.
Since Rhythmbox as an app don't really show the user the difference between an MP3 and an OGG you would assume that you could drag and drop ANY music file onto the iPod. While a small notice saying that this will lead to loss in quality might be reasonable, it certainly SHOULD do what the user asks it to do.
While I might want to reencode my entire music collection at some point, simple conversion from OGG->mp3 might be what I want if I just want to listen to a certain album on the road.
There is really nothing Apple can do about it. The only thing this project and other iPod-projects have done is to deduce how the interface to the iPod works and implement something that supports it. This is certainly not illegal.
Besides, while Apple are known for litigation, I seriously doubt they would try to go for this given the miniscule chance of them getting anything positive out of it.
"Miguel has a solid reputation and has done a lot for the community, but in this case he is either (best case) a fool for thinking that Micro-Soft can be trusted or (worst case) a quisling. Either way, it's barge pole time."
I'm sorry, but there is at least one more option which you are conviniently disregarding: c) He's right
I disagree. Since you have no recollection of it, it would just be a time waster. A black hole in which you sink for hours at a time.
What would be the point of experiencing total bliss (love or whatever) for some time if you can't remember it afterwards? It might as well never have happened and that is what it will feel like to you.
I used to think like this, but then I realised that one of the really great thing about movies and games is remembering them afterwards and talking about them with your mates.
We have the same system in Norway. It is basically a tax on Televisions and is used to fund the state television channels like BBC (in England) and NRK (in Norway).
It is meant to provide an alternative to commercial TV-channels and they produce some really good things that may never normally be commercially viable.
Since practically everyone has a television I guess it would make more sense to just take it in as income tax.
"If bundling is MicroSoft's crime, then it's certainly Apple's, too."
No, it certainly isn't. You are misunderstanding anti-trust, and people modding you up seem to be misunderstanding it as well.
Anti-trust legislation deals with using an existing monopoly to increase your market share in other areas. Apple is not a monopoly, and there is no law against vertically integrated solutions. When apple bundles a media player, their media player is not suddenly dominant in the world of media players.
Microsoft on the other hand basically has a monopoly on desktop operating systems (if you want to run a very common range of applications, your only choice is often Microsoft).
It means that when Microsoft decides to bundle an application, this application becomes dominant in it's market unless it really, really stinks (read Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player).
Apples bundling takes their applications to 1-2% of the market. Microsofts take their applications to 90-95% of the market. It is the last problem that antitrust tries to help against (very unsuccesfully if I might add).
A free Linux solution can never be a monopoly because everyone is free to distribute them as they see fit.
This would require someone using the source code to provide a HUGE list of updates. Where should this be clearly labelled? In the documentation? In the splash screen? In the About-box?
What if there were several companies providing changes to the original source code. Where would the end be? After 10 years, how many changes would be listed?
"-the original author(s) are credited as the creators of the original code"
Why only the original? What if someone contributed something that was more than a 100% of the original contribution? If the original contributors were credited, shouldn't them? And where should that be presented?
"-if this code is used as part of a commercial product, any modification of a source code file which was an original part of this software's source code must be made available under this license."
Eh.. So you are using the original source files as the judgement of modification? So if someone copies the source files completely, and writes around all your problems in other source files without distributing changes, then that is better than someone changing your source files without distributing the changes?
The thing is, a license is complicated if it tries to do something other than give away all rights..
GPL or Copyleft gives away most rights, but not all, and tries to make sure that the work done by the original contributors is kept open without ending up being used in closed source projects without the copyright holder being asked about it. I find that to be perfectly fine.
The problem is that you can't write something really simple in legalese. All the possible problems, of which I've mentioned only a few, have to be taken into account, or you might end up in a lawsuit not going your way, sooner or later.
There are several KDE-only distributions around (Xandros, Lycoris, Lindows), yet no GNOMErs seem to care all that much.
The minute someone tries to create a GNOME-only desktop system, like UserLinux, a flock of people (slashbots) go mental about it. What is the point? There is plenty of room for an integrated GNOME-only desktop.
Choice is good people say, but including both desktop-systems make integration issues a lot more difficult, and resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Plus if choice is good, then having the choice of a GNOME-only desktop is good. Include KDElibs and Qt, and people can still run their KDE-apps.
Now, I'm not going to be involved in a discussion about whether Bill Gates deserves honorary titles or not, but the royals in England have been under critisism for giving titles out like candies.
It is felt amongst some people that the titles are a way of trying to make artists and others conform.
A number of people have also been refusing the titles lately, like the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who wrote this about it:
"The lure of meeting royalty And touching high society Is damping creativity and eating at our heart."
Not true. The Gimp's UI is not alien to GNOME. Look at the upcoming Gimp 2.0, it might not conform entirely to the GNOME HIG, but it certainly looks like a GNOME-app, and feels like a GNOME-app. It uses GNOME-style icons, it has the right GNOME button ordering, most of the dialogs are very GNOME-like.
It might not use all the GNOME-technologies (for cross-platform reasons), but the user would never know that. For the user, The Gimp IS a GNOME-app. The main drive behind GTK+ has moved from The Gimp to GNOME ages ago, so The GIMP is using the most important GNOME-technology.
But the fact that you can't code very well does not mean that you can't be a manager.
However, I agree about the notion that moving into management because you suck at what you currently do, might give you a bit of a surprise when you find out that you suck at management too.
Personally I think this reaks of an old mans "everything was better in the old days"-attitude.
I have seen plenty of movies since the start of the 90s that I think can be compared with the old movies you mention in quality.
They are highly different, and you may not like them, but I feel they are on their way to become just as big classics. Think of "Pulp Fiction", "The usual suspects", "Leon", "Amalie" and lots of European and american movies. While I don't agree with the ordering at IMDB for instance, you can find lots of movies in the top 250 that deserve to be there and are made in the last 10 years.
I don't like the top-10 music all that much, but there are plenty of other music around for people who want really high quality stuff. It may not all be rock-music, but that does not mean it is not good.
Culture has also become more individualised, with more subcultures, which can explain the lack of an "Elvis" just as easily as lack of quality. People just don't all like the same thing anymore.
Why should you care as long as you get a cheap burner that can burn both formats and both formats are supported by DVD-ROM drives and standalone DVD-players?
And afaik almost all computers these days come with a DVD-ROM drive, so that is what happened to them.
"While working at an employer you are learning. Can you guarantee that anything you write has not benefitted from knowledge gained while working for you current employer. So such clauses are covering this benefit."
This is just crap. What I learn while being in a job is to both mine and my employers benefit. The employer can't own what I have learned, and can not make me forget the things I learned as soon as I leave the company.
I can be made to sign a contract not giving away trade secrets, but generic things I learn from experience is something I PERSONALLY own and noone can take that away from me. And if you just accept a company trying to do it, you give away your rights to thinking.
Unless you specifially add a clause to the GPL that you are allowed to include this code. As the copyright owner of a GPL-program you are perfectly entitled to do that.
"...with people saying that if the computer wins over the human it means that "That's it, here we are, computers are more intelligent than man"."
Well, that is just a stupid thing to say anyway. If a computer consistently beats humans in chess, the only thing that has proved is that it is better than humans in chess.
Chess, is not as some people seem to believe, the absolute sign of intelligence.
These are rather unscrupulous people, and if they realize they have been played like this, they may very well try to get some sort of revenge that is less funny than these photographs.
Personally I would just stay clear of them completely. Making fun of hard core criminals is not always that funny in the end.
"folks should check out http://www.jpfo.org the guys who had the temerity to place the 1968 Gun Control Act next to a translation of pre-WW2 Nazi-era gun control laws, and let folks see the similarities for themselves. "
How delightfully manipulative of them. Just because the Nazis had some really nasty and horrible idiology doesn't mean that EVERYTHING they did was bad. They did not stop making regular decisions because it wasn't evil enough.
You could probably find some crazy group that agrees with your opponents in any argument and use the agreement against them, but that is just low.
Slashdot Mirror
Debian and SuSE are also very much opposed to the new XFree86 license change. When Red Hat and SuSE, the two biggest commercial distributions change and Debian in addition, the new default target for device drivers will be X.org, which will push other distributions forward, if the license issue is not enough by itself.
I'm willing to bet that X.org will be de facto standard X-implementation in under two years. There is just no good reasons not to (unless maybe if XFree86 changes their minds, but I feel the issues are deeper than that).
Fedora/Red Hat are simply the first in a wave.
While this is certainly true, I can think of myself and lots of other people willing to take that loss in quality in order to not have to reencode their entire music collection.
Since Rhythmbox as an app don't really show the user the difference between an MP3 and an OGG you would assume that you could drag and drop ANY music file onto the iPod. While a small notice saying that this will lead to loss in quality might be reasonable, it certainly SHOULD do what the user asks it to do.
While I might want to reencode my entire music collection at some point, simple conversion from OGG->mp3 might be what I want if I just want to listen to a certain album on the road.
There is really nothing Apple can do about it. The only thing this project and other iPod-projects have done is to deduce how the interface to the iPod works and implement something that supports it. This is certainly not illegal.
Besides, while Apple are known for litigation, I seriously doubt they would try to go for this given the miniscule chance of them getting anything positive out of it.
"Miguel has a solid reputation and has done a lot for the community, but in this case he is either (best case) a fool for thinking that Micro-Soft can be trusted or (worst case) a quisling. Either way, it's barge pole time."
I'm sorry, but there is at least one more option which you are conviniently disregarding:
c) He's right
And that is why we gathered up in huge cities with millions of people around us ensuring that we at most can have a few square meters of land.
I disagree. Since you have no recollection of it, it would just be a time waster. A black hole in which you sink for hours at a time.
What would be the point of experiencing total bliss (love or whatever) for some time if you can't remember it afterwards? It might as well never have happened and that is what it will feel like to you.
I used to think like this, but then I realised that one of the really great thing about movies and games is remembering them afterwards and talking about them with your mates.
We have the same system in Norway. It is basically a tax on Televisions and is used to fund the state television channels like BBC (in England) and NRK (in Norway).
It is meant to provide an alternative to commercial TV-channels and they produce some really good things that may never normally be commercially viable.
Since practically everyone has a television I guess it would make more sense to just take it in as income tax.
You realise that this is a programming problem that could actually be solved when you have the source code and at least one skilled programmer?
"If bundling is MicroSoft's crime, then it's certainly Apple's, too."
No, it certainly isn't. You are misunderstanding anti-trust, and people modding you up seem to be misunderstanding it as well.
Anti-trust legislation deals with using an existing monopoly to increase your market share in other areas. Apple is not a monopoly, and there is no law against vertically integrated solutions. When apple bundles a media player, their media player is not suddenly dominant in the world of media players.
Microsoft on the other hand basically has a monopoly on desktop operating systems (if you want to run a very common range of applications, your only choice is often Microsoft).
It means that when Microsoft decides to bundle an application, this application becomes dominant in it's market unless it really, really stinks (read Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player).
Apples bundling takes their applications to 1-2% of the market. Microsofts take their applications to 90-95% of the market. It is the last problem that antitrust tries to help against (very unsuccesfully if I might add).
A free Linux solution can never be a monopoly because everyone is free to distribute them as they see fit.
"- all changes are clearly labelled"
This would require someone using the source code to provide a HUGE list of updates. Where should this be clearly labelled? In the documentation? In the splash screen? In the About-box?
What if there were several companies providing changes to the original source code. Where would the end be? After 10 years, how many changes would be listed?
"-the original author(s) are credited as the creators of the original code"
Why only the original? What if someone contributed something that was more than a 100% of the original contribution? If the original contributors were credited, shouldn't them? And where should that be presented?
"-if this code is used as part of a commercial product, any modification of a source code file which was an original part of this software's source code must be made available under this license."
Eh.. So you are using the original source files as the judgement of modification? So if someone copies the source files completely, and writes around all your problems in other source files without distributing changes, then that is better than someone changing your source files without distributing the changes?
The thing is, a license is complicated if it tries to do something other than give away all rights..
GPL or Copyleft gives away most rights, but not all, and tries to make sure that the work done by the original contributors is kept open without ending up being used in closed source projects without the copyright holder being asked about it. I find that to be perfectly fine.
The problem is that you can't write something really simple in legalese. All the possible problems, of which I've mentioned only a few, have to be taken into account, or you might end up in a lawsuit not going your way, sooner or later.
Yes. It is in Fink now, which means that GNOME 2.4.x should be extremely simple to install on OSX.
Read this for instructions.
Or that the compiler Microsoft uses builds the backdoor in, and it is not in the source code of Windows itself.
This would actually make perfect sense, as it would be easier to hide when distributing Windows source code through the shared source program.
Also remember that SSE was using AMDs ideas from 3dnow.
There are several KDE-only distributions around (Xandros, Lycoris, Lindows), yet no GNOMErs seem to care all that much.
The minute someone tries to create a GNOME-only desktop system, like UserLinux, a flock of people (slashbots) go mental about it. What is the point? There is plenty of room for an integrated GNOME-only desktop.
Choice is good people say, but including both desktop-systems make integration issues a lot more difficult, and resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Plus if choice is good, then having the choice of a GNOME-only desktop is good. Include KDElibs and Qt, and people can still run their KDE-apps.
Now, I'm not going to be involved in a discussion about whether Bill Gates deserves honorary titles or not, but the royals in England have been under critisism for giving titles out like candies.
It is felt amongst some people that the titles are a way of trying to make artists and others conform.
A number of people have also been refusing the titles lately, like the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who wrote this about it:
"The lure of meeting royalty
And touching high society
Is damping creativity and eating at our heart."
Not true. The Gimp's UI is not alien to GNOME. Look at the upcoming Gimp 2.0, it might not conform entirely to the GNOME HIG, but it certainly looks like a GNOME-app, and feels like a GNOME-app. It uses GNOME-style icons, it has the right GNOME button ordering, most of the dialogs are very GNOME-like.
It might not use all the GNOME-technologies (for cross-platform reasons), but the user would never know that. For the user, The Gimp IS a GNOME-app. The main drive behind GTK+ has moved from The Gimp to GNOME ages ago, so The GIMP is using the most important GNOME-technology.
But the fact that you can't code very well does not mean that you can't be a manager.
However, I agree about the notion that moving into management because you suck at what you currently do, might give you a bit of a surprise when you find out that you suck at management too.
Personally I think this reaks of an old mans "everything was better in the old days"-attitude.
I have seen plenty of movies since the start of the 90s that I think can be compared with the old movies you mention in quality.
They are highly different, and you may not like them, but I feel they are on their way to become just as big classics. Think of "Pulp Fiction", "The usual suspects", "Leon", "Amalie" and lots of European and american movies. While I don't agree with the ordering at IMDB for instance, you can find lots of movies in the top 250 that deserve to be there and are made in the last 10 years.
I don't like the top-10 music all that much, but there are plenty of other music around for people who want really high quality stuff. It may not all be rock-music, but that does not mean it is not good.
Culture has also become more individualised, with more subcultures, which can explain the lack of an "Elvis" just as easily as lack of quality. People just don't all like the same thing anymore.
Why should you care as long as you get a cheap burner that can burn both formats and both formats are supported by DVD-ROM drives and standalone DVD-players?
And afaik almost all computers these days come with a DVD-ROM drive, so that is what happened to them.
"While working at an employer you are learning. Can you guarantee that anything you write has not benefitted from knowledge gained while working for you current employer. So such clauses are covering this benefit."
This is just crap. What I learn while being in a job is to both mine and my employers benefit. The employer can't own what I have learned, and can not make me forget the things I learned as soon as I leave the company.
I can be made to sign a contract not giving away trade secrets, but generic things I learn from experience is something I PERSONALLY own and noone can take that away from me. And if you just accept a company trying to do it, you give away your rights to thinking.
You might not understand this, but not all people reading Slashdot has English as their native language.
I would actually say that considering that my main language is Norwegian, my english is pretty damn good. How is your Norwegian by the way?
Unless you specifially add a clause to the GPL that you are allowed to include this code. As the copyright owner of a GPL-program you are perfectly entitled to do that.
"...with people saying that if the computer wins over the human it means that "That's it, here we are, computers are more intelligent than man"."
Well, that is just a stupid thing to say anyway. If a computer consistently beats humans in chess, the only thing that has proved is that it is better than humans in chess.
Chess, is not as some people seem to believe, the absolute sign of intelligence.
These are rather unscrupulous people, and if they realize they have been played like this, they may very well try to get some sort of revenge that is less funny than these photographs.
Personally I would just stay clear of them completely. Making fun of hard core criminals is not always that funny in the end.
"folks should check out http://www.jpfo.org the guys who had the temerity to place the 1968 Gun Control Act next to a translation of pre-WW2 Nazi-era gun control laws, and let folks see the similarities for themselves. "
How delightfully manipulative of them. Just because the Nazis had some really nasty and horrible idiology doesn't mean that EVERYTHING they did was bad. They did not stop making regular decisions because it wasn't evil enough.
You could probably find some crazy group that agrees with your opponents in any argument and use the agreement against them, but that is just low.