Things that target in thought about how windows is particular implemented, and are hard to rebuild on other systems that use other techniques.
Take in example drive letters, you have them in unix after all? No. Take in example functions accepting backslash paths. Take any API functions that build upon the messaging concept windows uses. You have to workaround it hardly to rebuild it for X. Take direct-X hooks. Take IE library hooks. (Sure you want to have some sort of HTML pane do you? Now they would be suprising if they didn't use the IE libs for that would it)
I'm wonering how this is possible. IE is now so tightened into microsoft windows even the logon screen uses some IE library... (Yes you cannot even log into windows without using implicitly IE).
I guess your tool leaves some "cricitcal" IE libraries in place....I do not longer have the ms tool chain myself, but if you're borred you can make a dll walk for logon.exe...)
As everyone is so worried about Microsoft these days, another monopoly is slipping through the cracks.
That reminds me af the two grandpa's of the muppet show. Do you really thing you have an influence here on/. on what is going on on stage? I guess it's more like tho grandpa's commenting every happening on it, but IMHO it doesnt matter which actor thay see and which slips.
Well back in my school days in labour we should build some OPV circuit, well somehow I wired it wrong and when powered the chip exploded and a particle of it even made a small cut in the walle. I thought cool, that we'll do again immidiatly, took the next OPV out of the drawer and plugged in instead of the exploded one, then powered it and nothing happened, it died just siliently, we tried a few other ones, but none other exploded:(, seems it was a one-time event only *g*
Well this evolves is an old boring quarrel.
1) When you decide to try out Linux, the first thing you realize is you have a lot of choices. Distribution, Window Manager, Sound Support, etc. Choices are great but thoroughly researching them requires a great deal of time. With Windows, you only have to chose between the latest DOS or NT based system.
Since when is choice bad? Well then I also think drving a car is a complicated thing there are so many models to choose from when buying one.
2. With Linux, you need to figure out if your hardware is supported
Until some exceptions most is, I had yet no problems, or not more than having on windows. Especially try to get windows drivers fop newer windors for older hardware. Or the other way around try to get drivers for older windows. I still not have a windows 3.11 PCMCIA driver for my little 386 notebook. Nor do I get windows NT drivers for my old SB CDROM.
3) The actual installation process is much more complicated for most Linux distributions than it is for Windows. My experience is with RedHat62 and Potato. In both cases, if the user wants to do any customizing, he is confronted with complicated stuff like partitioning hard drives and selecting from long lists of obsficated modules.
This is complete nonsense. I've lastly installet some dual boot machines for friends. (Win98, SuSE 7.3) SuSE was always less work, you just pressed enter all the time, while Win98 had bath problems with the graphic card ane th CDROM.
6) Linux does a poor job of abstracting the internal workings. For example, when I go to change permissions on a file, I type chmod -R 755 public_html.
You can also write
chmod a=rwx,u=rx,o=rx public_html
hiding how flags are stored inside, of course it's more to write thats why most use the octal form.
-
Summurifing I think unix has suffered long from geeks, who were honestly even proud that things are complicated, making them better over the masses. I think it's time for this to stop.
Re:No proprietary unices left on x86
on
No Solaris 9 for x86
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
An alternative thought to this is that Windows 2000, being a much more mature OS than NT
Do you know that win2000 and winNT are infact the same OS? 2000 is just a newer verison/update of the existing System. Win2000 was called NT 5.0 during development and has still this as versions tag today. (analogous WinXP == WinNT 6.0)
Don't let marketing confuse you and make you believe you buyed more than just an ver. update at the full price. (thats what the new naming scheme is all about IMHO)
Nonsense. (MS)DOS is not free, I've seen "abandonware" sites beeing shut down just because they had MSDOS 5.0 on it.
And did you ever use KDE, huh? I explained to a newcomer in one hour how to surf, browse, send emails, access a newsnet server, and play little games on it, don't talk about nonsense crap for having to learn weeks.
(Yes it takes weeks (or more) to understand HOW it works, but that's nat different on any other OS, except on most even impossible if your not working in that company and have access to the internals, but I also can drive my car very well without having an idea what an engine is)
Well at the red cross they do use computers for sure, but it also runs well for some time with just radio and pen&paper, surely this means quite more work for the operator and after the system comes back online once again work since all events have to be entered afterward into the db for statisic (and juristic) purposes, but no lives depend directly on the computer cooridnating system (as long the operator has it's wits together)
Re:answers : no & no - Re:Impressive [...] ske
on
LindowsOS Marches On
·
· Score: 1
They are using WINE which is not GPL, but a BSD like license, that doesn't force you to lay open modifications.
No the human brain is not needed for keeping blood pressure, or muscle tension.
Remember that in example even the heart is prooven to beat _alone_ without any body around it. Persoanally such seems to me a little bit cruel medicine but that sort of exists. Also all other muscles having I think with horizontal fiber are also working themselfs without brain interaction, like the digestion or parts of the spine. Nope really most of the brain is needed for thinking.
The body "thinks" already for itself for staying alive, actually the brain only exits to organize food, find sexual partners and to keep care of your family.
How many Linux users would buy Micorosoft Office for Unix?
Heh? Would you? For me I can tell I would not, and guess thats the way of a huge percentage. And now for programming, all the beatiful idealism aside, when programming commercially you also have to bend to the market rules, altough we programmers generally hate that deeply:o) No (estimated) market -> No product.
I recall being taught something called the 80/20 rule, that applies to almost anything and everything.
Pah, thats one of the all unifying sentences I shudder when seeing it, normally used by fanatics. I forgot which scientist it was that said "It seems every new theory is first far overstated, before it gets it right place in science", especially at times where the evolutions theory was new and was applied to really everything even a lot of places where it by far did not fit.
For an AI we're still at calculation capability was shortly far away to be able to "simulate" a human brain. The human brain has 20 Giga Neurons, with 2000-5000 synapses per neuron (the basic calculation unit) resulting in a capacitiy of 10 Tera "Byte". It is frightening that for today 2001 this is not so far apart. Theoretically we would already have enough storage capability to "store" a human brain on hard disk. But going for calculation capability we're lucky wise still years away. Since all the Neurons in our brain can work parallell. We've a outrageous serial calculation capability, but our human capability of parallel computing is still enourmes.
To get near to human brains Von Neumann machines as we're using today with a central CPU are the wrong way, altough in key sematics they can already match the human brain they will not do it through the human capability of doing a lot of calculations at the same time. The way to match it lies not in the CPU but in the FPGAs, and here were still light years away. How many cells (""Neorons"") does an typical high performance LCA have today? 10.000 maybe? Well that is still far far away from mine 20.000.000.0000 I've in my head:o) I can still sleep in peace, not worring about seeing AI in my lifetime, but if the duplication law of computing power goes my children might have to face it.
At the end CLI has it's and GUI has it places. I think we cam both imagine examplos where they confront each other.
After all I cannot imagine to do programming applications in a desktop only system like the article descripes. We -NEED- files, and this hierachically. So end we end up at an coexistence of both, files for those who need them, an hidden behind the surface for those who "just" want to email/browse/gameplay, which prettv much the status quo an all systems today.
True and wrong, to some parts I agree especially when I'm reading into compiler related things, sometimes I've the intention things are merely drawn more complicated as they are.
However on the other side the orignal poster is very right and this has nothing to ho with "nerding". Taxe a look at the usual cash registers. Are they intuative? Hell no. Are they effective? Very. You need to train your personal on te machine but once learned they are rather fast at work. Imagine how shopping would be if the casheer would had to enter/correct your items using a mouse and a click-drag-drop sytem. So are casheers geeks? Truely not.
Re:Perpetuating the use of Windows software on Lin
on
What's up with Lindows?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What kind of comment is this? Software is software, and right now some of the new, great software is a heck of a lot easier to write for the Windows platform.
I'm a software developer and I strongly disagree at this point, if you're pointing at MS visual C++. The win32 API is one of the dirtiest and most unhandy API's I've worked with so far. For what I touched in the past only MSDOS beated it with it's terminate-stay-resitent-crap.
Personally I find QT/KDE a far more intuative and an easier API.
Well I asumeed here you refered to lowlevel and middle software. If you're doing with VB you're fine of with development time. But having (commercially) programmed VB applications in the past I tell you it's a horror to get them run across different windows systems. When I developed it it ran fine under win95. THen win98, did it run? No the printer API suddendly behaves differntly. Then they moved to Win2000, did it run? No again the API changed somewhat in behaviour.
You're right if programming targeted toward the market. If I today have to programm an end user application I want to sell, windows would still be my selection. Why? Since most users use it. 2nd reson? Because linux users (like me:o) can be sometimes be terrible extermist advocates. Paying for software at all? Not OpenSource?
(However if I want to build today a server, Linux is my selection, it's cheaper and I personally find it far more reliable (you need only the knowhow you've to aquire only once) If I want to build a high end embedded system Linux is my selection. I don't have to pay royality licenses, I have all the source, I can freely modify it, it has less overhead (kernel can be smaller than 500K). writing hardware drivers for it is tousend times more easier than win95/NT/2000/XP. If I would sell a complete "solution" I would also sell my application together with linux software. But still my Apps would proparly be closed source.
Yes, there will. The "undo" button will be to reduce CO2 emissions after we've proven that they are a problem, and watch them fall back to equilibrium.
No, there will not. Look at venus, you know how it looks like? Well not much life there, but actually it's really that not much nearer to the sun than earth. Venus is in reality the sister planet of earth, nearly same weight, nearly same concentration of raw materials.
In the early astronomie people believed atmosphere on the venus would be actually 40-50 hotter than on earth. And calculated naive from the additional amount of sun hitting it this would be correct.
Now how it comes that it is so different to earth? Having Tousends of degrees on surface?
Well fact is today we believe that venus and earth were once really nearly the same. Both had water, and good conditions for life to be created. However venus was somewhat closer to sun, so a the atmosphere was really quite some bit hotter. say 40 degrees. Now from this temprature the oceans evaporate a bit more. Note that CO2 is not the only hothouse gas we know of. H2O is also one, normally just clearing itself fast through rain, but having a hotter base temprature you have more H20 in the atmosphere, which in turn is a hothouse gas, incresaing atmosphere tempreature, which in turn will result into more H2o to volatilize. Which in turn will increase tempreature. Until slowly after some time (maybe years) you hit 100 the death point. At this point the ocean will boil and making suddendly a perfect hothouse. Temprature will rocket upwards. Until some other materials begin to vaporize, until you reach a point where metals will start to enter gas form, again adding hothouse effects to the atmosphere, but I guess no life will worry then about this. Then you've venus.
Earth atmosphere is not self stabiliziting after it crosses a certain point, it is self destructiong. (with tempreature the negative (stabilizing) feedback gets weaker and weaker and a some point turns into a positive, thats the point of no return. Now the problem is we don't know our atmosphere/ocean system in detail, and we cannot really predict where this point will be.
the Earth isn't currently the hottest it's been this millenium, much less the hottest ever.
That is partly true if you consider the last millenium:) But it is prooven from ice atmospheric bubbles in ice enclosions (from south pole) that since the whole existence of mankind there was never as much CO2 in the atmosphere than we've currently, and we're still blowing more into it at a rate that has never been there before.
The earth system is nothing to play with, and look what will happen. We should have learned in the last 200 years that ecologic systems can be very delicate, and relatively easily been tipped off / brought to struggle.
No. Copyright goes far beyond support or interest, it will take until the year 2086 until you con legally view win95 to be public domain. That's our copyrght law, pal.
The other abandonware concept goes only after the "no suitor - no judge" principle.
I know from sides that have been shut down for distributing MSDOS 3.0 (ie. abandonkeep.com)
Honestly do you really think anybody is hot for your changes in the linux kernel? Your competition? Really not.
I'm now working privatly quite some time on some free software apps. My experience on how many people are really interested in the code were depressing.
Put your modification on a ftp server, or ask them in the user manual to request it per email. After all your competition first has to buy a product from you, than has to tell you that it did so, and than request the source changes, and than has to find them usefull at all.
Okay if two competiting companies run linux on the same processor type I can imagine that you want to give away your changes at the last moment as possible. But as long they run a different os or a different cpu only, they will find your patch worth nothing. Giving it to puplic will not hit your competiting advantage.
Getting it in the torvalds kernel is a task itself, and you must be really after it if you want to see a patch in there. If you're just selling a device and a patch with it, there is in reality no way it will find it's way in linus' kernel
New users -and casual users- need Windows (or a Mac) so they don't have to worry about the details of configuring the system. Learning exactly how PnP works isn't something they are interested in. As long as the only thing they use the computer for is simple tasks -write letters or surf the net- Linux isn't for them.
As long as they have to maintain it themselfs. But beeing an expert you're normally usually target for maintaing your friends computer. Recently a relative, who was totally unaware of computers asked me to indroduce him to it. And against all window users advice, I installed linux for him (with KDE), yes I installed everything for him as he is a complete new comer. (would be the same with windows). I showed him how to start the machine, how to shutdown, how to write emails, how to use konquerer to surf, how to use sysgard to kill hanged ups, etc. etc. Sure he hasn't seen a bash, and I didn't show it to him, but actually he does not need it. Do you think the KDE desktop is any harder to use as a windows desktop? Really not even a bit harder anywhere? And in contrast to windows if he calls me having a problem, I just have to tell him to go online, and can ssh into his machine looking what's going on.
The idea on FreeSoftware here is that you've the complete sourcecode, so if there is a bug, find it yourself, may sound hard but thats the way it is. See it from the otherside as company your not dependent (and your deadlines) on an another company and hope it fixes the bug (against ignoring your requests/problems, what happened to me in the past when we used a closed source OS as basis. They gave up the product line, fired their complete develoment team, and your product line suddendly has to die with it, and thus so also my department I worked at that times died as a long termed net result.)
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean about "windows-only" hooks???
Things that target in thought about how windows is particular implemented, and are hard to rebuild on other systems that use other techniques.
Take in example drive letters, you have them in unix after all? No. Take in example functions accepting backslash paths. Take any API functions that build upon the messaging concept windows uses. You have to workaround it hardly to rebuild it for X. Take direct-X hooks. Take IE library hooks. (Sure you want to have some sort of HTML pane do you? Now they would be suprising if they didn't use the IE libs for that would it)
I'm wonering how this is possible. IE is now so tightened into microsoft windows even the logon screen uses some IE library... (Yes you cannot even log into windows without using implicitly IE).
I guess your tool leaves some "cricitcal" IE libraries in place....I do not longer have the ms tool chain myself, but if you're borred you can make a dll walk for logon.exe...)
As everyone is so worried about Microsoft these days, another monopoly is slipping through the cracks.
/. on what is going on on stage? I guess it's more like tho grandpa's commenting every happening on it, but IMHO it doesnt matter which actor thay see and which slips.
That reminds me af the two grandpa's of the muppet show. Do you really thing you have an influence here on
Well back in my school days in labour we should build some OPV circuit, well somehow I wired it wrong and when powered the chip exploded and a particle of it even made a small cut in the walle. I thought cool, that we'll do again immidiatly, took the next OPV out of the drawer and plugged in instead of the exploded one, then powered it and nothing happened, it died just siliently, we tried a few other ones, but none other exploded :(, seems it was a one-time event only *g*
Well this evolves is an old boring quarrel.
1) When you decide to try out Linux, the first thing you realize is you have a lot of choices. Distribution, Window Manager, Sound Support, etc. Choices are great but thoroughly researching them requires a great deal of time. With Windows, you only have to chose between the latest DOS or NT based system.
Since when is choice bad? Well then I also think drving a car is a complicated thing there are so many models to choose from when buying one.
2. With Linux, you need to figure out if your hardware is supported
Until some exceptions most is, I had yet no problems, or not more than having on windows. Especially try to get windows drivers fop newer windors for older hardware. Or the other way around try to get drivers for older windows. I still not have a windows 3.11 PCMCIA driver for my little 386 notebook. Nor do I get windows NT drivers for my old SB CDROM.
3) The actual installation process is much more complicated for most Linux distributions than it is for Windows. My experience is with RedHat62 and Potato. In both cases, if the user wants to do any customizing, he is confronted with complicated stuff like partitioning hard drives and selecting from long lists of obsficated modules.
This is complete nonsense. I've lastly installet some dual boot machines for friends. (Win98, SuSE 7.3) SuSE was always less work, you just pressed enter all the time, while Win98 had bath problems with the graphic card ane th CDROM.
6) Linux does a poor job of abstracting the internal workings. For example, when I go to change permissions on a file, I type chmod -R 755 public_html.
You can also write
chmod a=rwx,u=rx,o=rx public_html
hiding how flags are stored inside, of course it's more to write thats why most use the octal form.
-
Summurifing I think unix has suffered long from geeks, who were honestly even proud that things are complicated, making them better over the masses. I think it's time for this to stop.
An alternative thought to this is that Windows 2000, being a much more mature OS than NT
Do you know that win2000 and winNT are infact the same OS? 2000 is just a newer verison/update of the existing System. Win2000 was called NT 5.0 during development and has still this as versions tag today. (analogous WinXP == WinNT 6.0)
Don't let marketing confuse you and make you believe you buyed more than just an ver. update at the full price. (thats what the new naming scheme is all about IMHO)
Well I guess for now any alien will do.
Nonsense. (MS)DOS is not free, I've seen "abandonware" sites beeing shut down just because they had MSDOS 5.0 on it.
And did you ever use KDE, huh? I explained to a newcomer in one hour how to surf, browse, send emails, access a newsnet server, and play little games on it, don't talk about nonsense crap for having to learn weeks.
(Yes it takes weeks (or more) to understand HOW it works, but that's nat different on any other OS, except on most even impossible if your not working in that company and have access to the internals, but I also can drive my car very well without having an idea what an engine is)
Well at the red cross they do use computers for sure, but it also runs well for some time with just radio and pen&paper, surely this means quite more work for the operator and after the system comes back online once again work since all events have to be entered afterward into the db for statisic (and juristic) purposes, but no lives depend directly on the computer cooridnating system (as long the operator has it's wits together)
They are using WINE which is not GPL, but a BSD like license, that doesn't force you to lay open modifications.
No the human brain is not needed for keeping blood pressure, or muscle tension.
Remember that in example even the heart is prooven to beat _alone_ without any body around it. Persoanally such seems to me a little bit cruel medicine but that sort of exists. Also all other muscles having I think with horizontal fiber are also working themselfs without brain interaction, like the digestion or parts of the spine. Nope really most of the brain is needed for thinking.
The body "thinks" already for itself for staying alive, actually the brain only exits to organize food, find sexual partners and to keep care of your family.
Come people, get it straight and honest:
:o) No (estimated) market -> No product.
How many Linux users would buy Micorosoft Office for Unix?
Heh? Would you? For me I can tell I would not, and guess thats the way of a huge percentage. And now for programming, all the beatiful idealism aside, when programming commercially you also have to bend to the market rules, altough we programmers generally hate that deeply
I recall being taught something called the 80/20 rule, that applies to almost anything and everything.
:o) I can still sleep in peace, not worring about seeing AI in my lifetime, but if the duplication law of computing power goes my children might have to face it.
Pah, thats one of the all unifying sentences I shudder when seeing it, normally used by fanatics. I forgot which scientist it was that said "It seems every new theory is first far overstated, before it gets it right place in science", especially at times where the evolutions theory was new and was applied to really everything even a lot of places where it by far did not fit.
For an AI we're still at calculation capability was shortly far away to be able to "simulate" a human brain. The human brain has 20 Giga Neurons, with 2000-5000 synapses per neuron (the basic calculation unit) resulting in a capacitiy of 10 Tera "Byte". It is frightening that for today 2001 this is not so far apart. Theoretically we would already have enough storage capability to "store" a human brain on hard disk. But going for calculation capability we're lucky wise still years away. Since all the Neurons in our brain can work parallell. We've a outrageous serial calculation capability, but our human capability of parallel computing is still enourmes.
To get near to human brains Von Neumann machines as we're using today with a central CPU are the wrong way, altough in key sematics they can already match the human brain they will not do it through the human capability of doing a lot of calculations at the same time. The way to match it lies not in the CPU but in the FPGAs, and here were still light years away. How many cells (""Neorons"") does an typical high performance LCA have today? 10.000 maybe? Well that is still far far away from mine 20.000.000.0000 I've in my head
I can still remember the marketeer of Intel explaining that the brand new Pentium 4 will speed up the internet. *g* *g* *g* *g* :o)
At the end CLI has it's and GUI has it places. I think we cam both imagine examplos where they confront each other.
After all I cannot imagine to do programming applications in a desktop only system like the article descripes. We -NEED- files, and this hierachically. So end we end up at an coexistence of both, files for those who need them, an hidden behind the surface for those who "just" want to email/browse/gameplay, which prettv much the status quo an all systems today.
True and wrong, to some parts I agree especially when I'm reading into compiler related things, sometimes I've the intention things are merely drawn more complicated as they are.
However on the other side the orignal poster is very right and this has nothing to ho with "nerding". Taxe a look at the usual cash registers. Are they intuative? Hell no. Are they effective? Very. You need to train your personal on te machine but once learned they are rather fast at work. Imagine how shopping would be if the casheer would had to enter/correct your items using a mouse and a click-drag-drop sytem. So are casheers geeks? Truely not.
What kind of comment is this? Software is software, and right now some of the new, great software is a heck of a lot easier to write for the Windows platform.
:o) can be sometimes be terrible extermist advocates. Paying for software at all? Not OpenSource?
I'm a software developer and I strongly disagree at this point, if you're pointing at MS visual C++. The win32 API is one of the dirtiest and most unhandy API's I've worked with so far. For what I touched in the past only MSDOS beated it with it's terminate-stay-resitent-crap.
Personally I find QT/KDE a far more intuative and an easier API.
Well I asumeed here you refered to lowlevel and middle software. If you're doing with VB you're fine of with development time. But having (commercially) programmed VB applications in the past I tell you it's a horror to get them run across different windows systems. When I developed it it ran fine under win95. THen win98, did it run? No the printer API suddendly behaves differntly. Then they moved to Win2000, did it run? No again the API changed somewhat in behaviour.
You're right if programming targeted toward the market. If I today have to programm an end user application I want to sell, windows would still be my selection. Why? Since most users use it. 2nd reson? Because linux users (like me
(However if I want to build today a server, Linux is my selection, it's cheaper and I personally find it far more reliable (you need only the knowhow you've to aquire only once) If I want to build a high end embedded system Linux is my selection. I don't have to pay royality licenses, I have all the source, I can freely modify it, it has less overhead (kernel can be smaller than 500K). writing hardware drivers for it is tousend times more easier than win95/NT/2000/XP. If I would sell a complete "solution" I would also sell my application together with linux software. But still my Apps would proparly be closed source.
Man you just understood nothing. The additional impact on earth is only ~50 not 780 the rest is atmospheric feedback.
Yes, there will. The "undo" button will be to reduce CO2 emissions after we've proven that they are a problem, and watch them fall back to equilibrium.
:) But it is prooven from ice atmospheric bubbles in ice enclosions (from south pole) that since the whole existence of mankind there was never as much CO2 in the atmosphere than we've currently, and we're still blowing more into it at a rate that has never been there before.
No, there will not. Look at venus, you know how it looks like? Well not much life there, but actually it's really that not much nearer to the sun than earth. Venus is in reality the sister planet of earth, nearly same weight, nearly same concentration of raw materials.
In the early astronomie people believed atmosphere on the venus would be actually 40-50 hotter than on earth. And calculated naive from the additional amount of sun hitting it this would be correct.
Now how it comes that it is so different to earth? Having Tousends of degrees on surface?
Well fact is today we believe that venus and earth were once really nearly the same. Both had water, and good conditions for life to be created. However venus was somewhat closer to sun, so a the atmosphere was really quite some bit hotter. say 40 degrees. Now from this temprature the oceans evaporate a bit more. Note that CO2 is not the only hothouse gas we know of. H2O is also one, normally just clearing itself fast through rain, but having a hotter base temprature you have more H20 in the atmosphere, which in turn is a hothouse gas, incresaing atmosphere tempreature, which in turn will result into more H2o to volatilize. Which in turn will increase tempreature. Until slowly after some time (maybe years) you hit 100 the death point. At this point the ocean will boil and making suddendly a perfect hothouse. Temprature will rocket upwards. Until some other materials begin to vaporize, until you reach a point where metals will start to enter gas form, again adding hothouse effects to the atmosphere, but I guess no life will worry then about this. Then you've venus.
Earth atmosphere is not self stabiliziting after it crosses a certain point, it is self destructiong. (with tempreature the negative (stabilizing) feedback gets weaker and weaker and a some point turns into a positive, thats the point of no return. Now the problem is we don't know our atmosphere/ocean system in detail, and we cannot really predict where this point will be.
the Earth isn't currently the hottest it's been this millenium, much less the hottest ever.
That is partly true if you consider the last millenium
The earth system is nothing to play with, and look what will happen. We should have learned in the last 200 years that ecologic systems can be very delicate, and relatively easily been tipped off / brought to struggle.
shrink wrapped licenses have eitherway been ruled to bo not enforceable. -
No. Copyright goes far beyond support or interest, it will take until the year 2086 until you con legally view win95 to be public domain. That's our copyrght law, pal.
The other abandonware concept goes only after the "no suitor - no judge" principle.
I know from sides that have been shut down for distributing MSDOS 3.0 (ie. abandonkeep.com)
Honestly do you really think anybody is hot for your changes in the linux kernel? Your competition? Really not.
I'm now working privatly quite some time on some free software apps. My experience on how many people are really interested in the code were depressing.
Put your modification on a ftp server, or ask them in the user manual to request it per email. After all your competition first has to buy a product from you, than has to tell you that it did so, and than request the source changes, and than has to find them usefull at all.
Okay if two competiting companies run linux on the same processor type I can imagine that you want to give away your changes at the last moment as possible. But as long they run a different os or a different cpu only, they will find your patch worth nothing. Giving it to puplic will not hit your competiting advantage.
Getting it in the torvalds kernel is a task itself, and you must be really after it if you want to see a patch in there. If you're just selling a device and a patch with it, there is in reality no way it will find it's way in linus' kernel
New users -and casual users- need Windows (or a Mac) so they don't have to worry about the details of configuring the system. Learning exactly how PnP works isn't something they are interested in. As long as the only thing they use the computer for is simple tasks -write letters or surf the net- Linux isn't for them.
As long as they have to maintain it themselfs. But beeing an expert you're normally usually target for maintaing your friends computer. Recently a relative, who was totally unaware of computers asked me to indroduce him to it. And against all window users advice, I installed linux for him (with KDE), yes I installed everything for him as he is a complete new comer. (would be the same with windows). I showed him how to start the machine, how to shutdown, how to write emails, how to use konquerer to surf, how to use sysgard to kill hanged ups, etc. etc. Sure he hasn't seen a bash, and I didn't show it to him, but actually he does not need it. Do you think the KDE desktop is any harder to use as a windows desktop? Really not even a bit harder anywhere? And in contrast to windows if he calls me having a problem, I just have to tell him to go online, and can ssh into his machine looking what's going on.
The idea on FreeSoftware here is that you've the complete sourcecode, so if there is a bug, find it yourself, may sound hard but thats the way it is. See it from the otherside as company your not dependent (and your deadlines) on an another company and hope it fixes the bug (against ignoring your requests/problems, what happened to me in the past when we used a closed source OS as basis. They gave up the product line, fired their complete develoment team, and your product line suddendly has to die with it, and thus so also my department I worked at that times died as a long termed net result.)
What do you get if you put ...
implementors of languages such as Perl, Python, Smalltalk and Curl, and lock them into a room for a day?
- 4 smashed-in heads.
Those who've watched the sometimes religious language discussions might get an idea.