Using H1B workers accomplished nothing except to lower costs for American companies. The espoused "lack of technical talent" was a myth. There is/was an abundance of talent, however it was more experienced/expensive than the CEOs wanted to pay. Therefore the push for increased numbers of imported, entry-level foreign workers.
You were around for the Dot Com boom, right? Where everyone who claimed to be able to code HTML was treated like a C developer?
Except for that fact that his site gets a lot of hits daily, and that link has been posted all over the web for several days now (and Slashdot is, as ever, last in line to get the info), you might have a point.
The reason it's slow is because it has been Slashdotted before Slashdot posted the story, by other sites.
They aren't going to win any more of the desktop market by making it look fancier. Microsoft should instead be focusing completely on security, performance, interoperability, stability, and flexibility - you know, all of the things that are allowing Linux to kill Microsoft on the server side. In other words, they should attack the competition by improving the things that they are bad at. Drastically lowering prices wouldn't hurt, either.
The problem with this argument is that you assume that all of their developers work on the same part of the codebase.
It doesn't work that way.
Some developers work on the UI. Some work on the subsystems. Some work on the kernel. The UI guys focus on making the UI better. The networking guys focus on making the networking better. The GUI API guys work on making the GUI API better. And so on.
Other than making the security features more accessible and easy to use, the UI designers and coders have nothing to do with it.
Assume that there is a guy there who does nothing but work on notepad. (There isn't, but for the moment assume that is the case). Or on MS Paint. Just exactly why should that person up sticks and work on security?
That was what the original poster said he tried to replace Outlook with where he worked, and was bitching about being turned down. So, in this instance, yes, it has to be Mozilla. Otherwise, surely, he'd have suggested other options too.
But we could be going in circles all night if we keep this up, so:
Yes, you could replace it with a suite of other apps (with the added maintenance costs, if those apps are not integrated into a cohesive system). And no, it doesn't look like he suggested that.
I have to say: updating these machines is a completely and utter waste of my time and skills but it definatly keeps me employed. My boss is so apathetic that he never wants to make changes. I've offered on several occasions of virus outbreaks in the company to switch everyone to mozilla mail so we'd stop getting those Lookout (Outlook) viruses. But no!
Did you also offer to write a centralized, shared calendaring package, shared address book, full contact management system and meeting scheduler for them? Or did you just think they used Outlook for email?
I just created a Word document, blah.doc and put some text into it. I made sure I had a couple of undo points. I closed it and opened it back up, I couldn't undo SHIT. So where the hell am I being granted this mysterious "convenience?"
You're not.
There are two ways of saving a word document:
Fast Save
Full Save
Fast Save dumps the binary from memory into the file. Full Save compacts the binary image, and reorders it. This takes time.
Word's text stream is stored using a piece table. One of the benefits of a piece table is that if you keep the meta information about the text, you can get nearly infinite undo. The way it does this is by having an original data stream, and an appended data stream. Whenever you add data to the file, it gets added as a chunk to the end of the appended data stream. Whenever you delete, the meta table is updated to remove the text from the stream, but otherwise the text itself is left unaffected.
As a result, text is never removed from the document. A Fast Save (which is the default) under Word dumps the Piece Table as-is (there is probably some compaction over time to remove the no-longer-used data, but it probably only occurs above a given threshold of used to unused text). A full save deconstructs the piece table's meta information, and turns it back into one contiguous stream of data.
It's all just a function of the way the text is stored while it's being edited. Different editors have different mechanisms; some store data based on lines, and some store it using a gap buffer. But ultimately, the problem exists because Word uses a piece table, and it dumps the entire table to a file by default.
It's actually a sensible way of handling the text data. However, whoever designed the Fast Save algorithm probably didn't consider the ramifications of the text still being stored in the document. The best workaround? Wipe the unused sections of the piece table. But then you might as well return to using a Full Save, as you'll be ditching the performance benefits anyway.
If those rumors are true, then the worm didn't cause the power failures, it just disabled the systems that would have prevented them. That this happened at around the same time is just a coincidence, - or maybe minor power failures happen frequently and were just prevented from spreading?
Take it from someone who's soon-to-be-parents-in-law are up to their necks in the power + safety industry... no, they don't run Windows.
Control frontends and GUIs may run Windows. They may also run Java apps. The back-end is ALL Unix (and specifically NOT Linux), because there are very few OS vendors who will certify and indemnify the use of their OS in that kind of safety critical environment. Windows explicitly states that it's not for use in such an enviornment.
Well, I've got an upper limit of comfort for using my own money for this - namely, about $3k-$5k. Problem is that it's a short... the next project may make money, but it's unlikely that this one will -- but this step is necessary to get the experience to make people comfortable in investing in the next project.
Credit cards.... mmmmm... nah. Not going to risk that. Not on a short. On a feature, maybe.
Gigli has, to date, raked in an amazing $5,600,000. (It cost $54,000,000 to make, not including marketing).
Freddy Got Fingered, however, has grossed $14,249,005 to date, and cost $15,000,000 to make.
Let's hope that Gigli doesn't get close.
It's sad to think that for $15,000 (give or take), I can make a 35 minute short which will be much more entertaining than this (the script is ready, it's nearly completely cast, all we need is a location and financing). Yet I'm having trouble getting the money to do my short, while crap like this has no trouble getting cash.
The video drivers were userland code in NT3.x. They moved them into the kernel for speed in NT4 (and later).
Actually, it's GDI which was moved into the kernel for speed, as that code had been tested and running without problems for 10 years, so the performance benefits massively outweighed the possibility of instability.
The video drivers themselves have always been in the kernel, although until NT4, those drivers tended to be written and carefully vetted by Microsoft.
I know software crashes occasionally, no matter who wrote it, but man, you ought to get your power checked or something, I mean holy shit man, My TV crash? NEVER! All three of my cell phones? NEVER! I don't have a DVD player, but my cable box? NEVER! My router? NEVER! I do turn it off when i leave for overnight or longer trips. WAP? I don't have one, but my cordless phone (landline?) NEVER! I don't have a Satellite Receiver either, but my microwave? NEVER! My automatic sprinkler system controller? NEVER! My coffee pot? NEVER! My VCR? NEVER! I could go on, but what's the point?
I've had cable boxes crash too.
Anything with a CPU in it has the possibility of crashing. Particularly when that CPU is decompressing streaming data.
Cellphones? Yep, they crash. Do a websearch. Similarly for other devices. Power is not the issue; the complexity of the task is.
Your router hasn't crashed? Wow. That's lucky. Ever updated the firmware on it? Ever wondered why you had to? Heck, even cable modems and DSL modems can crash.
Do yourself a favor. Don't assume that because you've never seen it happen that it doesn't happen. Do a websearch for "Cable modem" +crash. Or any other similar device. They crash all the time.
As for your cordless phone? It's a simple retransmitter. Sprinkler system and/or coffee pot? Timers and/or simple sensors. Yet again, you're dealing with a state machine that can be described on a single sheet of paper. Microwave? Here's your microwave:
Set Power = 10 Set Counter = TimeToCook While (Counter > 0) { Sleep 1 second Decrement Counter If Door Opened, Break } Set Power = 0
Not exactly an impressive bunch of code, is it?
What TV do you have? Mine's a Sony HDTV. It doesn't always wake up correctly. Yours is little more than a set of pulse generators - most of what it does is done with hardware, not software. Mine has a much more complex computer inside it than yours.
Yeah, he should check out his hardware/driver setup on his 2003 box, but you also need to remember 2003 has just been released, and is, for all intents and purposes,still BETA. Until it's been run in the field for a year or so, and the bug reports have been submitted back to Microsoft and fixed, it is BETA. Just try getting Exchange Server up and running properly, and with all the functionality of it running on 2000 server. It's a bitch, and even Microsoft admits that
Linux is therefore, still BETA, and always will be. Please.
I'm not quite sure what the iDrive is, but I read a story about the malaysian financial minister. He was going to a meeting in a brand new BMW, with computer driven everything. Suddenly, the embedded computer crashed which caused the doors to lock without a way to open them. Same for the windows and the hole in the roof.
As it was 200+ degrees fahrenheit, he was almost cooked before a maintenance man managed to smash the bullet proof windows with a sledge.
Hmmm... I don't recall there being many computer systems that weren't designed for military use which would survive 200+ degrees fahrenheit temperatures... That's a definite failure mode right there - regardless of the OS.
My Dad works with voice mail systems, if its loaded with winnt it can take up to 30 minutes to boot. With linux it takes maybee 5. One of the problems with windows is the inability to strip out stuff you don't need.
Hmmm... Windows NT 4.0 takes less than a minute to boot typically. So is this a server machine with lots of self-checks on startup that Linux bypasses or what?
Yeah... Views like that their recent claims that the components of Windows XP are too integrated to separate out for OEMs who want to pick and choose (so that Dell could have shipped, say, AOL/Mozilla just as "integrated" into windows as IE) are complete lies.
We have come to expect our pc's to crash. It seems to be just a thing they do. But how often has youre tv crashed after years of working non-stop? Youre cd-player? Youre washing machine? I am currently testing 2003 of windows, it has crashed repeatdly on a intel rig. MS just can't write crash proof software. It is the price we pay for the wide choice of hardware and uses we get on a pc. On my phone, thank you but no thanks.
Your TV has the equivalent complexity of Notepad, or Bash. Most of the hard work is in materials choices and up-front design -- it's not complex; it's just refinement.
Code, however, is complex.
How often has your TV crashed? Mine does occasionally; it doesn't turn on when asked. It goes through the motions, degausses, and doesn't actually display a picture. My DVD player? Sure. Plenty of times. My cell phone? Yep. It has crashed a couple of times too. How about a router? Yep. Wireless Access Point? Uhuh. DirecTV Satellite Receiver? Yep.
Crashes = unexpected failures due to a circumstance arising which was not planned for. Some crashes (hardware failure related) are unavoidable. And crashes as a whole become more and more likely the more complex the system.
Software systems are complex. Heck, the Linux guys can't write crash proof software either. (Watch! Pop in a Knoppix CD. Run Abiword. Click Maximize a couple of times. Watch as it cycles around and around in an infinite loop resizing itself).
Oh, and if Windows 2003 is crashing repeatedly on your rig, you're not using certified drivers and/or should carefully check your hardware to make sure that it's not faulty, and nothing is loose. Might also help to stop running games on a server OS.
Yes, Apple's liscense isn't really the most free of them all. This is because Apple's primary motivations in using Open Source solutions are to: a)harness the man power and combined talent of the open source movement to aide their own software, thus making profit from software they would otherwise have to write themselves:) b)sell to the open source crowd. Face it, how many/. geeks would have bought anything Apple before OS X and Darwin came out? It's cool now though. Admittedly, that's kind of what made me get my iBook...
So maybe we have a new category: free as in, you're free to help Apple.
Funny... I don't see it that way.
The way I see it is this:
Apple wanted to use a mature kernel for their OS. So they used it. As a mark of respect and good faith to the Open Source community whose work they used, they decided to release the changes they made (which they were not obliged to) back to the community. The caveats they added ensure that they can use any derivatives of the work which they did, and that their true intellectual property (the Mac GUI and libraries) which they've spent 20 years developing remains theirs. (Otherwise, if the license was true GPL, they'd have to release all of their other work under the GPL as well).
So their license limits their involvement to the changes to the kernel. They don't want to release their GUI under a 'free'* license? Good for them. They don't have to. They were acting in good faith, and that should be the end of it.
Simon * I use 'free' in quotes, lowercase, because I highly disagree with the FSF's definition of 'free'. Particularly because the only license which meets that description is not a license at all - it's called Public Domain.
Similarly, there's a difference between *not recommending* a software license and *forcing* you not to use said software license
The difference being that not forcing people to do their work for free shows a basic level of respect for that person's time, life and energy, whereas not recommending a software license because it doesn't entirely mesh with your dogma is just sour grapes.
What Apple's trying to do is to 'appear' to be free, and make money off other's work (gratis). If Apple wants to hire some programmers, pay them money, they needen't even give the code under APSL, proprietary licensing would do. Why all this subterfuge about Open Sourcing a Freedom anyway?
So what?
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't get the problem here. If you don't agree with their license, then you have a very simple option:
Don't Give Them Your Code
You're not being forced at gunpoint to write software for them under the APSL -- nobody is. It's the developer's personal choice. Your opinions frankly don't come into it at all.
Apple don't have to release any of their software as Open Source. They chose to do so. That's not good enough for you? I take it you'd prefer that they give away everything for free? Including the hardware? Or do you only view intellectual property as being worthless?
Exactly. Everyone is dumping on the Free Software Foundation for no reason again. The FSF says that the APSL is a free software license (a high form of praise indeed coming from the FSF), but that it is somewhat unfair to users, mainly because it gives Apple rights that other users don't. Thus it recommends that the licensed not be used for new products.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. FSF is telling people not to use the APSL because they will be giving some of their rights to Apple. Duh! No one would do this anyway.
They're also telling people not to use the APSL because it (like Linux) allows people to link code released under it to proprietary code.
Sounds a bit disingenuous to me. After all, where would GNU be without Linux... which has the same 'problems'?
Yet the funny thing is that they want the techie crowd to do all the work.
Wonder how much their enthusiasm in the role of "measuring stick" would be checked, if they had to impliment their own ideas?
Well, the techie crowd did tell them, up front, and in-your-face that:
a) This is so easy to do, I'm not going to bother with this whole "getting paid for my work" thing.
b) Linux is the best ever, everyone should use it, Windows and Mac OS are for morons.
c) Oh, and did we mention that we're giving it all away for free.
People expect things to work the way they expect them to work. When you given them those things for free, but do not otherwise make it exceptionally clear, they still expect things like... well... it doing things how they're used to it doing them in OSes they've paid for.
Simply put: choose: you're competing with commerical OSes or you're not. If you're competing with commercial OSes, you have to please that userbase. If you're not, you can do whatever the fuck you like. Don't try having it both ways - it won't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Using H1B workers accomplished nothing except to lower costs for American companies. The espoused "lack of technical talent" was a myth. There is/was an abundance of talent, however it was more experienced/expensive than the CEOs wanted to pay. Therefore the push for increased numbers of imported, entry-level foreign workers.
You were around for the Dot Com boom, right? Where everyone who claimed to be able to code HTML was treated like a C developer?
Except for that fact that his site gets a lot of hits daily, and that link has been posted all over the web for several days now (and Slashdot is, as ever, last in line to get the info), you might have a point.
The reason it's slow is because it has been Slashdotted before Slashdot posted the story, by other sites.
Slashdot, not-quite-up-to-date news for nerds.
They aren't going to win any more of the desktop market by making it look fancier. Microsoft should instead be focusing completely on security, performance, interoperability, stability, and flexibility - you know, all of the things that are allowing Linux to kill Microsoft on the server side. In other words, they should attack the competition by improving the things that they are bad at. Drastically lowering prices wouldn't hurt, either.
The problem with this argument is that you assume that all of their developers work on the same part of the codebase.
It doesn't work that way.
Some developers work on the UI. Some work on the subsystems. Some work on the kernel. The UI guys focus on making the UI better. The networking guys focus on making the networking better. The GUI API guys work on making the GUI API better. And so on.
Other than making the security features more accessible and easy to use, the UI designers and coders have nothing to do with it.
Assume that there is a guy there who does nothing but work on notepad. (There isn't, but for the moment assume that is the case). Or on MS Paint. Just exactly why should that person up sticks and work on security?
This country could use a lot more clearheaded, innovative thinking, and a lot less "MBA mentality".
And a few less people who've swallowed the "H1B holders do the same work for much less" bullshit.
Can you show when/where RMS told that the only free software license is the GPL ?
Please, dont distort RMS words to your own benefit. Try to do a little more research before posting.
He does, however, believe that the only free licenses are those which are semantically identical to the GPL.
But it doesn't have to be Mozilla.
That was what the original poster said he tried to replace Outlook with where he worked, and was bitching about being turned down. So, in this instance, yes, it has to be Mozilla. Otherwise, surely, he'd have suggested other options too.
But we could be going in circles all night if we keep this up, so:
Yes, you could replace it with a suite of other apps (with the added maintenance costs, if those apps are not integrated into a cohesive system). And no, it doesn't look like he suggested that.
Simon
There are alternatives.
Yes there are. And Mozilla isn't one of them. Which may explain the response the OP got.
Simon
I have to say: updating these machines is a completely and utter waste of my time and skills but it definatly keeps me employed. My boss is so apathetic that he never wants to make changes. I've offered on several occasions of virus outbreaks in the company to switch everyone to mozilla mail so we'd stop getting those Lookout (Outlook) viruses. But no!
Did you also offer to write a centralized, shared calendaring package, shared address book, full contact management system and meeting scheduler for them? Or did you just think they used Outlook for email?
You're not.
There are two ways of saving a word document:
Fast Save dumps the binary from memory into the file. Full Save compacts the binary image, and reorders it. This takes time.
Word's text stream is stored using a piece table. One of the benefits of a piece table is that if you keep the meta information about the text, you can get nearly infinite undo. The way it does this is by having an original data stream, and an appended data stream. Whenever you add data to the file, it gets added as a chunk to the end of the appended data stream. Whenever you delete, the meta table is updated to remove the text from the stream, but otherwise the text itself is left unaffected.
As a result, text is never removed from the document. A Fast Save (which is the default) under Word dumps the Piece Table as-is (there is probably some compaction over time to remove the no-longer-used data, but it probably only occurs above a given threshold of used to unused text). A full save deconstructs the piece table's meta information, and turns it back into one contiguous stream of data.
It's all just a function of the way the text is stored while it's being edited. Different editors have different mechanisms; some store data based on lines, and some store it using a gap buffer. But ultimately, the problem exists because Word uses a piece table, and it dumps the entire table to a file by default.
It's actually a sensible way of handling the text data. However, whoever designed the Fast Save algorithm probably didn't consider the ramifications of the text still being stored in the document. The best workaround? Wipe the unused sections of the piece table. But then you might as well return to using a Full Save, as you'll be ditching the performance benefits anyway.
Simon
If those rumors are true, then the worm didn't cause the power failures, it just disabled the systems that would have prevented them. That this happened at around the same time is just a coincidence, - or maybe minor power failures happen frequently and were just prevented from spreading?
... no, they don't run Windows.
Take it from someone who's soon-to-be-parents-in-law are up to their necks in the power + safety industry
Control frontends and GUIs may run Windows. They may also run Java apps. The back-end is ALL Unix (and specifically NOT Linux), because there are very few OS vendors who will certify and indemnify the use of their OS in that kind of safety critical environment. Windows explicitly states that it's not for use in such an enviornment.
Simon
Well, I've got an upper limit of comfort for using my own money for this - namely, about $3k-$5k. Problem is that it's a short... the next project may make money, but it's unlikely that this one will -- but this step is necessary to get the experience to make people comfortable in investing in the next project.
Credit cards.... mmmmm... nah. Not going to risk that. Not on a short. On a feature, maybe.
that's a bit presumptuous, isn't it? Maybe your movie would suck?
:)
If I thought that, unlike the creators of Gigli, I wouldn't try to make it or foist it on anyone.
Gigli has, to date, raked in an amazing $5,600,000. (It cost $54,000,000 to make, not including marketing).
Freddy Got Fingered, however, has grossed $14,249,005 to date, and cost $15,000,000 to make.
Let's hope that Gigli doesn't get close.
It's sad to think that for $15,000 (give or take), I can make a 35 minute short which will be much more entertaining than this (the script is ready, it's nearly completely cast, all we need is a location and financing). Yet I'm having trouble getting the money to do my short, while crap like this has no trouble getting cash.
Simon
The video drivers were userland code in NT3.x. They moved them into the kernel for speed in NT4 (and later).
Actually, it's GDI which was moved into the kernel for speed, as that code had been tested and running without problems for 10 years, so the performance benefits massively outweighed the possibility of instability.
The video drivers themselves have always been in the kernel, although until NT4, those drivers tended to be written and carefully vetted by Microsoft.
Rip Script overview
Specification (zip file)
And this version (there are earlier) dates from July 19th 1993.
RIPScrip appears to allow the transfer of scripts to the client, including template information, field handling, and autonomous response code.
Sounds like there is indeed prior art for this.
Simon
I know software crashes occasionally, no matter who wrote it, but man, you ought to get your power checked or something, I mean holy shit man, My TV crash? NEVER! All three of my cell phones? NEVER! I don't have a DVD player, but my cable box? NEVER! My router? NEVER! I do turn it off when i leave for overnight or longer trips. WAP? I don't have one, but my cordless phone (landline?) NEVER! I don't have a Satellite Receiver either, but my microwave? NEVER! My automatic sprinkler system controller? NEVER! My coffee pot? NEVER! My VCR? NEVER! I could go on, but what's the point?
I've had cable boxes crash too.
Anything with a CPU in it has the possibility of crashing. Particularly when that CPU is decompressing streaming data.
Cellphones? Yep, they crash. Do a websearch. Similarly for other devices. Power is not the issue; the complexity of the task is.
Your router hasn't crashed? Wow. That's lucky. Ever updated the firmware on it? Ever wondered why you had to? Heck, even cable modems and DSL modems can crash.
Do yourself a favor. Don't assume that because you've never seen it happen that it doesn't happen. Do a websearch for "Cable modem" +crash. Or any other similar device. They crash all the time.
As for your cordless phone? It's a simple retransmitter. Sprinkler system and/or coffee pot? Timers and/or simple sensors. Yet again, you're dealing with a state machine that can be described on a single sheet of paper. Microwave? Here's your microwave:
Set Power = 10
Set Counter = TimeToCook
While (Counter > 0)
{
Sleep 1 second
Decrement Counter
If Door Opened, Break
}
Set Power = 0
Not exactly an impressive bunch of code, is it?
What TV do you have? Mine's a Sony HDTV. It doesn't always wake up correctly. Yours is little more than a set of pulse generators - most of what it does is done with hardware, not software. Mine has a much more complex computer inside it than yours.
Yeah, he should check out his hardware/driver setup on his 2003 box, but you also need to remember 2003 has just been released, and is, for all intents and purposes,still BETA. Until it's been run in the field for a year or so, and the bug reports have been submitted back to Microsoft and fixed, it is BETA. Just try getting Exchange Server up and running properly, and with all the functionality of it running on 2000 server. It's a bitch, and even Microsoft admits that
Linux is therefore, still BETA, and always will be. Please.
Simon
I'm not quite sure what the iDrive is, but I read a story about the malaysian financial minister. He was going to a meeting in a brand new BMW, with computer driven everything. Suddenly, the embedded computer crashed which caused the doors to lock without a way to open them. Same for the windows and the hole in the roof.
As it was 200+ degrees fahrenheit, he was almost cooked before a maintenance man managed to smash the bullet proof windows with a sledge.
Hmmm... I don't recall there being many computer systems that weren't designed for military use which would survive 200+ degrees fahrenheit temperatures... That's a definite failure mode right there - regardless of the OS.
My Dad works with voice mail systems, if its loaded with winnt it can take up to 30 minutes to boot. With linux it takes maybee 5. One of the problems with windows is the inability to strip out stuff you don't need.
Hmmm... Windows NT 4.0 takes less than a minute to boot typically. So is this a server machine with lots of self-checks on startup that Linux bypasses or what?
Yeah... Views like that their recent claims that the components of Windows XP are too integrated to separate out for OEMs who want to pick and choose (so that Dell could have shipped, say, AOL/Mozilla just as "integrated" into windows as IE) are complete lies.
That's recent as in "4 or 5 years ago", right?
We have come to expect our pc's to crash. It seems to be just a thing they do. But how often has youre tv crashed after years of working non-stop? Youre cd-player? Youre washing machine? I am currently testing 2003 of windows, it has crashed repeatdly on a intel rig. MS just can't write crash proof software. It is the price we pay for the wide choice of hardware and uses we get on a pc. On my phone, thank you but no thanks.
Your TV has the equivalent complexity of Notepad, or Bash. Most of the hard work is in materials choices and up-front design -- it's not complex; it's just refinement.
Code, however, is complex.
How often has your TV crashed? Mine does occasionally; it doesn't turn on when asked. It goes through the motions, degausses, and doesn't actually display a picture. My DVD player? Sure. Plenty of times. My cell phone? Yep. It has crashed a couple of times too. How about a router? Yep. Wireless Access Point? Uhuh. DirecTV Satellite Receiver? Yep.
Crashes = unexpected failures due to a circumstance arising which was not planned for. Some crashes (hardware failure related) are unavoidable. And crashes as a whole become more and more likely the more complex the system.
Software systems are complex. Heck, the Linux guys can't write crash proof software either. (Watch! Pop in a Knoppix CD. Run Abiword. Click Maximize a couple of times. Watch as it cycles around and around in an infinite loop resizing itself).
Oh, and if Windows 2003 is crashing repeatedly on your rig, you're not using certified drivers and/or should carefully check your hardware to make sure that it's not faulty, and nothing is loose. Might also help to stop running games on a server OS.
Simon
Yes, Apple's liscense isn't really the most free of them all. This is because Apple's primary motivations in using Open Source solutions are to: a)harness the man power and combined talent of the open source movement to aide their own software, thus making profit from software they would otherwise have to write themselves :) b)sell to the open source crowd. Face it, how many /. geeks would have bought anything Apple before OS X and Darwin came out? It's cool now though. Admittedly, that's kind of what made me get my iBook...
So maybe we have a new category: free as in, you're free to help Apple.
Funny... I don't see it that way.
The way I see it is this:
Apple wanted to use a mature kernel for their OS. So they used it. As a mark of respect and good faith to the Open Source community whose work they used, they decided to release the changes they made (which they were not obliged to) back to the community. The caveats they added ensure that they can use any derivatives of the work which they did, and that their true intellectual property (the Mac GUI and libraries) which they've spent 20 years developing remains theirs. (Otherwise, if the license was true GPL, they'd have to release all of their other work under the GPL as well).
So their license limits their involvement to the changes to the kernel. They don't want to release their GUI under a 'free'* license? Good for them. They don't have to. They were acting in good faith, and that should be the end of it.
Simon
* I use 'free' in quotes, lowercase, because I highly disagree with the FSF's definition of 'free'. Particularly because the only license which meets that description is not a license at all - it's called Public Domain.
Similarly, there's a difference between *not recommending* a software license and *forcing* you not to use said software license
The difference being that not forcing people to do their work for free shows a basic level of respect for that person's time, life and energy, whereas not recommending a software license because it doesn't entirely mesh with your dogma is just sour grapes.
What Apple's trying to do is to 'appear' to be free, and make money off other's work (gratis). If Apple wants to hire some programmers, pay them money, they needen't even give the code under APSL, proprietary licensing would do. Why all this subterfuge about Open Sourcing a Freedom anyway?
So what?
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't get the problem here. If you don't agree with their license, then you have a very simple option:
Don't Give Them Your Code
You're not being forced at gunpoint to write software for them under the APSL -- nobody is. It's the developer's personal choice. Your opinions frankly don't come into it at all.
Apple don't have to release any of their software as Open Source. They chose to do so. That's not good enough for you? I take it you'd prefer that they give away everything for free? Including the hardware? Or do you only view intellectual property as being worthless?
Exactly. Everyone is dumping on the Free Software Foundation for no reason again. The FSF says that the APSL is a free software license (a high form of praise indeed coming from the FSF), but that it is somewhat unfair to users, mainly because it gives Apple rights that other users don't. Thus it recommends that the licensed not be used for new products.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. FSF is telling people not to use the APSL because they will be giving some of their rights to Apple. Duh! No one would do this anyway.
They're also telling people not to use the APSL because it (like Linux) allows people to link code released under it to proprietary code.
Sounds a bit disingenuous to me. After all, where would GNU be without Linux... which has the same 'problems'?
Simon
Yet the funny thing is that they want the techie crowd to do all the work.
... well... it doing things how they're used to it doing them in OSes they've paid for.
Wonder how much their enthusiasm in the role of "measuring stick" would be checked, if they had to impliment their own ideas?
Well, the techie crowd did tell them, up front, and in-your-face that:
a) This is so easy to do, I'm not going to bother with this whole "getting paid for my work" thing.
b) Linux is the best ever, everyone should use it, Windows and Mac OS are for morons.
c) Oh, and did we mention that we're giving it all away for free.
People expect things to work the way they expect them to work. When you given them those things for free, but do not otherwise make it exceptionally clear, they still expect things like
Simply put: choose: you're competing with commerical OSes or you're not. If you're competing with commercial OSes, you have to please that userbase. If you're not, you can do whatever the fuck you like. Don't try having it both ways - it won't work.