...when DRM was generally considered a bad thing here (remember "fair use"?). Now people get blasted for being "ungrateful" if they criticise Apple's use of DRM (just read some of the comments to this [slashdot.org] story).
Amen. I don't know when DRM became cool but I know who did it, Apple. It seems like freedoms don't matter much when the packaging is so shiny and new. For everyone's talk about free software around here, it seems most of them are just repeating what gnu.org says in between iTunes purchases. DRM has all the same problems it's had before, people just trust Apple to make it okay. Well look at it like this, they've sold 100 million songs, where has it gotten us? They haven't loosened restrictions and fought for artists rights, they increased restrictions and the artists are still getting the same bad deals. The record labels told Apple to roll over and they did. I don't know how long people are going to keep trusting them to "make it better". Or maybe chains are acceptable if they're shiny enough.
Napster was shut down because any legitimate function it may have had was vastly overshadowed by the illegal activity that took place on its network. I'd say a similar argument holds for cheating in online games.
No this is completely untrue. Napster was shut down because the central server kept a hash of song names, the song names were copyrighted. The Napster servers were commiting copyright infringement. If substantial infringing use was all it took to shut down a network, why do Kaaza, Gnutella and WinMX still exist? Any noninfringing use makes the tool legitimate, because according to the law it's not the tool that's the problem but the one who is infringing.
Friendly for me is an installer that let's you know what's going on. When I have to go back and fix mistakes the "user-friendly" installer made, that's not my idea of friendly.
You can't arbitrarily redefine friendly and pretend that your favorite installer X is friendly. Friendly, Easy to understand or use for a specified agent. That says nothing about being verbose, or robust. It's about being easy to understand. Fedora's install, for all it's flaws, is easy to understand. LFS or Gentoo may give you a ridiculous amount of information and run on a blender, but it's not easy to understand. Especially for the uninitiated.
When the FCC enforces an audio broadcast flag, and all software has to respect it there will be free speech issues. Fair use is a free speech issue, mainly the ability to quote a segment. You can't do that with technology locks.
Don't think those locks affect your own content? Try to rip a CD with WMP to WMA. They encrypt it for your protection, and assume it's copyrighted material that nobody wants you to distribute, regardless of the author's wishes. It's also illegal to circumvent. Even if you own the copyright.
That's not really a good assumption as they're targeting small to medium sized businesses with this. Large businesses would probably have different pricing, just like they have different academic pricing. $5/mo is for the support, so I'm guessing volume licensing would apply to the support, since you don't actually pay for the software:)
You're counting MS volume licensing vs. Red Hat's non-volume licensing. It's not a fair comparison. How much would that MS software cost if you were counting it seperately like you're doing with RHL and vice versa.
Don't know why I'm biting at this one, but oh well.
You obviously aren't paying attention. Most open source projects have one or a few people who control what happens. For instance the Linux Kernel has one man who says "It's going to be done THIS way" and that's Linux Torvalds. Alot of open source projects are similar. Therefore your entire argument is invalidated, to think you could have avoided posting if you knew what you were talking about.
This troll comes up in any thread that has anything to do with Linux at all. Who the hell said anything about asking people to choose? This is for developers and hackers to mess with. The distro you're using will choose for you, just like Microsoft chooses what Windows drivers you have loaded by default. Does every person who runs a Dell Windows machine have to decide what version of the driver to use? No Dell installs it for them. However power users can install newer/beta drivers if they want. Same thing here, power users can enable this if they want. If not you'll never have to know about it or touch it.
Sorry for biting on the troll but I felt like explaining it.
Except that they didn't pull out of the free desktop market, but the "pay for cheap desktop" market. You want their desktop? Either use Fedora or White Box RHEL. You can still pay them too.
In Canada, you can ONLY make a copy of an original, not of a copy.
The regime does not address the source of the material copied. There is no requirement in Part VIII that the source copy be a non-infringing copy. Hence, it is not relevant whether the source of the track is a pre-owned recording, a borrowed CD, or a track downloaded from the Internet.
This is probably the most asinine comment about software development I have seen in a long time. Here's the way free software works. You purposely leave out features? Someone comes along and fixes that for you. If you tell them "Hey guys, leave this out so teh users will get l33t and l34rn to h4x0r L0L!" they will ignore you and add them anyway. Why? Because people won't learn the CLI if they don't want to. Computers are tools to be used as we see fit, not the other way around. If a user wants to never touch the CLI it's not your job to try to force them to do otherwise. In fact, if you think it's your job someone will come along and remind you that it's not. That's be beauty of free software, it's a free market.
So by all means, leave out features to get users to use the l33t CLI. It'll just mean I'll never have to worry about using your software.
Well let's all cry ATI a river, poor poor multimillion dollar corporation. Meanwhile I'm stuck with a crappy driver for my Radeon Mobility M7 because their driver doesn't support it.
Seriously though, have you ever read an article where people dissect the design of the boards? They go into way more detail than the source code to a driver would have to. These are just journalists analyzing information ATI themselves have released. I understand that you think releasing the source code would release all kinds of information that previously wasn't released, because it will. However I think you overestimate how much anybody will care. PR using open source comments is just ludicrous, try imagining a press release where they explain, "Well ATI released their open source drivers, then on this one line this guy says "we can only do 24-bit zbuffering in pipeline 37 if the 5th register is also full". That's bad! Very bad! Don't buy their products! Don't understand it? Trust me, as their competitor I am in a completely unbaised position to tell you that it's very bad. It's may well be really really bad. Give us money."
Nobody will care. All of the real interesting technology isn't in the drivers, but the cards themselves. Drivers are just value-add and they spend alot of time just taking care of the quirks of the various applications they're trying to run. These quirks would be handled pretty easily with open source, and not be applicable to other people's drivers.
I just think "Open source drivers are bad because they'd be giving away their secrets!!" is just a knee jerk reaction, similar to when people said the same thing about closed-source operating systems. If you really stop and think about what source code they'd be giving away, there really isn't much there that is so revolutionary that it must be kept under lock and key at all times. The real beef is in the silicon.
How do you expect CS researches to make money if they don't charge for their work? Maybe you can create really good knock-offs and implementations of standards using the promise of some vague support contracts to entice companies and the spare hours of out-of-work coders, but when will that actually create something?
Charging for your work and restricting access to your code are two entirely different things. I don't know about you, but as a software developer I am worth much more to my boss than simply my code. PARC could make money without restricting access to the code. For instance, having companies pay them to teach their driver writers how to use this new tech. PARC has the knowledge, which is worth much more than the code itself.
First, it's not about bringing Windows gamers to Linux, it's about keeping Linux users in Linux instead of having to reboot to play their games. There's alot to be said for no longer having to dual boot and WineX helps people do that. Mainly I see this with multiplayer games. People have one or possibly two games they play heavily in a given 6-month period. If WineX lets them run both those games and they otherwise want to stay in Linux, they'll become a full time Linux user, more likely to buy games with Linux support. It's not about getting people to convert, it's about allowing people who want to convert the ability to do so.
Second, the developers aren't the only one's who determine what gets ported where. Publishers would start putting pressure on developers if we say even a 10-20% share of the desktop market on Linux. How many Mac games get published? Macs are a smaller share of the desktop than Linux right now.
Third, I agree totally on the buying games with Linux ports instead of emulation. WineX doesn't hurt that at all. Nobody out there is saying "Well, it works with WineX so we won't do a Linux port." Theyre saying "nobody's using Linux on the desktop, why do we care?" Every person we can allow to use Linux full time just adds to the mindshare of Linux on the desktop. Things like Crossover Office, Wine and WineX help that. I know our office at work wouldn't be rolling out Linux on the developers desktops if we couldn't access IE and Outlook. They're not about to change the entire infrastructure but they'll allow us to use it if it doesn't cause them too much trouble. It works the same at home. If people can use their favorite apps in Linux they will be much happier with the switchover. Then they'll gradually move to native Linux applications because they will always work better.
Basically, WineX just allows gaming to get it's foot in the door. The future will most definately be native Linux clients, but until that's a reality we can't just ignore the situation out of principle. WineX allows people to play games under Linux that would never get a Linux port, it eases the pain of switching from Windows and causes them to have to reboot into Windows less. I don't see how that's a bad thing.
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No this is completely untrue. Napster was shut down because the central server kept a hash of song names, the song names were copyrighted. The Napster servers were commiting copyright infringement. If substantial infringing use was all it took to shut down a network, why do Kaaza, Gnutella and WinMX still exist? Any noninfringing use makes the tool legitimate, because according to the law it's not the tool that's the problem but the one who is infringing.
You can't arbitrarily redefine friendly and pretend that your favorite installer X is friendly. Friendly, Easy to understand or use for a specified agent. That says nothing about being verbose, or robust. It's about being easy to understand. Fedora's install, for all it's flaws, is easy to understand. LFS or Gentoo may give you a ridiculous amount of information and run on a blender, but it's not easy to understand. Especially for the uninitiated.
When the FCC enforces an audio broadcast flag, and all software has to respect it there will be free speech issues. Fair use is a free speech issue, mainly the ability to quote a segment. You can't do that with technology locks.
Don't think those locks affect your own content? Try to rip a CD with WMP to WMA. They encrypt it for your protection, and assume it's copyrighted material that nobody wants you to distribute, regardless of the author's wishes. It's also illegal to circumvent. Even if you own the copyright.
I play Ogg pretty exclusively on my Karma and I get 15 hours of battery life.
Aha! That does it. Also, try launching Moxula, then going to robin.sf.net and launching Moxula inside that. Now that's trippy ;)
Does anyone know why the robin homepage is like a tiedyed tshirt?
That's not really a good assumption as they're targeting small to medium sized businesses with this. Large businesses would probably have different pricing, just like they have different academic pricing. $5/mo is for the support, so I'm guessing volume licensing would apply to the support, since you don't actually pay for the software :)
You're counting MS volume licensing vs. Red Hat's non-volume licensing. It's not a fair comparison. How much would that MS software cost if you were counting it seperately like you're doing with RHL and vice versa.
Don't know why I'm biting at this one, but oh well.
You obviously aren't paying attention. Most open source projects have one or a few people who control what happens. For instance the Linux Kernel has one man who says "It's going to be done THIS way" and that's Linux Torvalds. Alot of open source projects are similar. Therefore your entire argument is invalidated, to think you could have avoided posting if you knew what you were talking about.
Please pay attention. One last time. Microsoft was convicted by the governments of several countries of having a monopoly. Apple wasn't.
This troll comes up in any thread that has anything to do with Linux at all. Who the hell said anything about asking people to choose? This is for developers and hackers to mess with. The distro you're using will choose for you, just like Microsoft chooses what Windows drivers you have loaded by default. Does every person who runs a Dell Windows machine have to decide what version of the driver to use? No Dell installs it for them. However power users can install newer/beta drivers if they want. Same thing here, power users can enable this if they want. If not you'll never have to know about it or touch it.
Sorry for biting on the troll but I felt like explaining it.
Except that they didn't pull out of the free desktop market, but the "pay for cheap desktop" market. You want their desktop? Either use Fedora or White Box RHEL. You can still pay them too.
Actually it's pretty well supported on any player except the iPod. I wouldn't call that a low number, iPods hardly have a 90% share of the market.
If things are delivered in a method that is hard to obtain, people still steal it
So the open source community is finally catching up to the propietary software business!
This is probably the most asinine comment about software development I have seen in a long time. Here's the way free software works. You purposely leave out features? Someone comes along and fixes that for you. If you tell them "Hey guys, leave this out so teh users will get l33t and l34rn to h4x0r L0L!" they will ignore you and add them anyway. Why? Because people won't learn the CLI if they don't want to. Computers are tools to be used as we see fit, not the other way around. If a user wants to never touch the CLI it's not your job to try to force them to do otherwise. In fact, if you think it's your job someone will come along and remind you that it's not. That's be beauty of free software, it's a free market.
So by all means, leave out features to get users to use the l33t CLI. It'll just mean I'll never have to worry about using your software.
You realize the graphics system for Win2k is built into the Kernel, right?
Well let's all cry ATI a river, poor poor multimillion dollar corporation. Meanwhile I'm stuck with a crappy driver for my Radeon Mobility M7 because their driver doesn't support it.
Seriously though, have you ever read an article where people dissect the design of the boards? They go into way more detail than the source code to a driver would have to. These are just journalists analyzing information ATI themselves have released. I understand that you think releasing the source code would release all kinds of information that previously wasn't released, because it will. However I think you overestimate how much anybody will care. PR using open source comments is just ludicrous, try imagining a press release where they explain, "Well ATI released their open source drivers, then on this one line this guy says "we can only do 24-bit zbuffering in pipeline 37 if the 5th register is also full". That's bad! Very bad! Don't buy their products! Don't understand it? Trust me, as their competitor I am in a completely unbaised position to tell you that it's very bad. It's may well be really really bad. Give us money."
Nobody will care. All of the real interesting technology isn't in the drivers, but the cards themselves. Drivers are just value-add and they spend alot of time just taking care of the quirks of the various applications they're trying to run. These quirks would be handled pretty easily with open source, and not be applicable to other people's drivers.
I just think "Open source drivers are bad because they'd be giving away their secrets!!" is just a knee jerk reaction, similar to when people said the same thing about closed-source operating systems. If you really stop and think about what source code they'd be giving away, there really isn't much there that is so revolutionary that it must be kept under lock and key at all times. The real beef is in the silicon.
The sad thing is, it never really stops being funny and relevant. Gentoo users keep doing the exact same thing in every thread.
If you think a bill that allows corporations to raid your house without proof has anything to do with file sharing, you need a little morning coffee :)
Charging for your work and restricting access to your code are two entirely different things. I don't know about you, but as a software developer I am worth much more to my boss than simply my code. PARC could make money without restricting access to the code. For instance, having companies pay them to teach their driver writers how to use this new tech. PARC has the knowledge, which is worth much more than the code itself.
What part of "rapidly becoming suitable" didn't you read? :)
First, it's not about bringing Windows gamers to Linux, it's about keeping Linux users in Linux instead of having to reboot to play their games. There's alot to be said for no longer having to dual boot and WineX helps people do that. Mainly I see this with multiplayer games. People have one or possibly two games they play heavily in a given 6-month period. If WineX lets them run both those games and they otherwise want to stay in Linux, they'll become a full time Linux user, more likely to buy games with Linux support. It's not about getting people to convert, it's about allowing people who want to convert the ability to do so.
Second, the developers aren't the only one's who determine what gets ported where. Publishers would start putting pressure on developers if we say even a 10-20% share of the desktop market on Linux. How many Mac games get published? Macs are a smaller share of the desktop than Linux right now.
Third, I agree totally on the buying games with Linux ports instead of emulation. WineX doesn't hurt that at all. Nobody out there is saying "Well, it works with WineX so we won't do a Linux port." Theyre saying "nobody's using Linux on the desktop, why do we care?" Every person we can allow to use Linux full time just adds to the mindshare of Linux on the desktop. Things like Crossover Office, Wine and WineX help that. I know our office at work wouldn't be rolling out Linux on the developers desktops if we couldn't access IE and Outlook. They're not about to change the entire infrastructure but they'll allow us to use it if it doesn't cause them too much trouble. It works the same at home. If people can use their favorite apps in Linux they will be much happier with the switchover. Then they'll gradually move to native Linux applications because they will always work better.
Basically, WineX just allows gaming to get it's foot in the door. The future will most definately be native Linux clients, but until that's a reality we can't just ignore the situation out of principle. WineX allows people to play games under Linux that would never get a Linux port, it eases the pain of switching from Windows and causes them to have to reboot into Windows less. I don't see how that's a bad thing.