> Personally, I think that's all a bit tinfoil-hat, but it's always possible.
Everything is possible. This is why intelligent people, when speculating, talk about what is very probable.
Re:GPL is the kiss of death for commerical softwar
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Leaving the GPL Behind
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· Score: 1
> No, no, no. The GPL is an agreement between the author and another > person. The GPL does not prohibit the author from making any other > agreement she wants with any other person.
I'm not sure I'm reading GPL the same way you are. To me it seems like a contract between code producer(s) and consumer(s). AFAIK the law doesn't really make much difference if the two are the same, though that's a rather rare case (the notable case happening a few months ago when Wells Fargo sued itself).
But that's academic. As you noted, as long as you are the only one creating and using a library, you don't really need a license. But if you release a library as GPL, then accept somebody else's patch that patched code is GPL. And you can't use it in your own non-GPL product.
> You don't want to license your code under the GPL, because it would > force the recipient to abide by the terms of the GPL? Okay, I'll grant > that one.
Phew, thanks.:)
But seriously, yes, that's my main point here. I don't like when GPL is sprung on me, so I don't spring it on other people.
> That's not "embrace, extend, extinguish." >... > In EEE, you (E1) take a popular protocol, one that allows several > products to interoperate happily. You release your own product using > that protocol. Next, when your market share is great enough, you add > undocumented "features" (E2) that make your tools more useful, while > causing competing products to go "WTF?" Finally, you hope, people > start using your product exclusively (E3), in order to ensure that > everything works.
For me that's no different than what FireFox did to IE with the, for example, Ctrl-K shortcut that takes you to the search bar. Only we are talking mindshare, not protocols, but IMO that binds even stronger.
(Side note: when I tried to use IE8 for a few days I got frustrated because Ctrl-K doesn't do the same thing as in FireFox. I found it amusing that Microsoft got their tactics turned on them and made the same mistake WordPerfect and Lotus made in not emulating the better sides and UI of their competitor but instead decided to create their own standards. Good luck with that.)
> Microsoft did it with Kerberos, they did it with ActiveX, > and they're even now trying to do it with ODF.
ActiveX is the main reason why I think embrace & extend is overplayed here. The playbook is:
1. Use a protocol or something. 2. Become dominant. 3. Extend it. 4. Fuck over all the others that don't know how to reverse engineer it or are too proud to do it.
But #2 is overlooked here, or done with handwaving about monopolies. And while Microsoft's distribution channel used to dominate before the age of the Internet (and still does for operating systems), it can't make an inferior product dominant. ActiveX clearly demonstrates that.
Also, if you remember the late nineties, the Java guys and the Netscape guys were all saying that Microsoft is dead because the web is the new OS (whatever that means). So what do you think Microsoft should have done? Suck Sun's and Netscape's dick or fight back?
> Because the GPL would be a good defense against them storming in > and wiping out your entire niche? MS has done it several times, > and tried it a dozen more.
Dude. I run a small software shop. I'm not on Microsoft's radar. So you are saying that out of some fear of them I should screw all other programmers like me who are trying to make a living selling software?
> But you should at least understand what the GPL is before you decide > whether to use it (or, more to the point, before you go on a public forum > and spread misinformation about the GPL in the course of explaining why > you won't use it)
I think I did understand it. Possibly I'm wrong. Your scolding above seems to indicate that you hold no such reservations. Funny, that.
Dejan
Re:GPL is the kiss of death for commerical softwar
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Leaving the GPL Behind
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· Score: 1
> You're saying that you wrote a bunch of libraries yourself, > included those libraries in your own commercial products, > then released them under BSD because releasing them under > the GPL would have forced the GPL-ification of the products?
Yes. Ditto for anybody else who wants to use my libraries.
> That's not how it works. You own the copyright, you can use > the code as you like, including packing it into proprietary > products. The hoops you're complaining about having to jump > through are imaginary.
Not really if I'm reading GPL correctly. What I _think_ you are saying is that since I'm the one writing the code and setting the rules for the license I can put out a license saying "this is under GPL for anybody but me" or something to that account, but that's not really GPL but a modification or a dual license.
But more important, people that use my library would effectively be forced to use GPL. As somebody that creates and sells software, that's exactly what I don't like done to me. I never was one of the kids to take their ball and go home because they don't like how the game is played. (And yes, I do send patches back to any libraries I use even when they are not GPL.)
> It's one thing to be okay with others making money off your code. > It's another thing to be okay with another company pulling an "embrace, > extend, extinguish" on you
People here use that phrase a lot, but I think it's an oversimplification. While I have seen MS do crazy shit (the original MFC license comes to mind), in the case of the browser, people forget how shitty Netscape was. IE won because it was a better product at that time.
Also, embrace & extend is a pretty good page for any software shop's playbook. For example, adding load & save for competing (closed source) product file formats to Word and Excel was a stroke of brilliance. FireFox, for example, did a similar thing when they supported IE's shortcut keys from day zero, and I applauded that move when switching to it. I wish more open-source GUI products did the same thing when trying to compete with the market leader.
But back to my main point: I don't spend one moment thinking about MS or Apple when releasing a library. Why would I screw all the people trying to make a living selling software just because of two companies?
Dejan
Re:GPL is the kiss of death for commerical softwar
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Leaving the GPL Behind
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· Score: 1
> That's what the LGPL is for.
That's what almost any open source (plus numerous closed-sourced) license except GPL is for. But the topic of this thread is GPL, so I was commenting on that.
Dejan
GPL is the kiss of death for commerical software
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Leaving the GPL Behind
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· Score: 3, Insightful
GPL is good for anybody not making money directly off software products. I don't buy all the ideology around it, but as Linus says it's a cool license because it enforces tit-for-tat.
However, GPL is the kiss of death for anybody trying to make money selling software products. If you have a software product and publish any of its libraries as GPL, then your product must effectively become GPL'ed. And you put hard work into it and want to charge money for that, but anybody can take that product and sell it cheaper or give it away for free.
You can then play games to work around it (spawn the GPL product from a commercial one and talk to it through a pipe or something) but whatever you do is just a kludge in order to dance around the license.
Personally, I gave away the few small, well-rounded libraries I made under the BSD license. I don't really mind if somebody takes them and uses them to build a product they'll be making money off. The knee-jerk reaction here is that when somebody says "commercial software" people imagine big dominant companies like Apple or Microsoft, but the number of programmers working there is dwarfed by the number of small 1-5 programmer shops trying to make a living.
In fact, I don't even mind if a programmer at Microsoft takes my source code and uses it in a product. I met a few of them and they are mostly nice folks trying to make the best software they can. If Microsoft shareholders profit to an infinitesimal amount from something I gave away for free, I don't really give a fuck.
Windows thread creation costs more than Unix thread creation because it does more. Whether that work is useful to most people is somewhat dubious.
Windows kernel is roughly based on VMS, which at the minimum has a different security model than Unix. The one in Windows is finely-grained, while the Unix one is fairly coarse.*
In addition, a bunch of things in Windows have thread affinity and that has to be set up too. The concept of thread affinity for things like windows is pretty good for a desktop OS, fairly lousy for a server one.
Dejan
* Windows security model is more powerful than Unix's user/group/world one (ask any large corporation admin), but comes at a significant performance and complexity price. I can teach any programmer the Unix security model in less than a minute, but I know very few Windows programmers that know anything about Windows ACL/SID/Token APIs. (Yes, ma, that's that last parameter in all those calls that you always set to NULL to inherit from the thread settings.)
We used something similar to kill my daughter's (benign) brain tumor that was in an inoperable location, so unfortunately I know a lot about the subject.
Devices like this have been used for decades to treat brain tumors. Search for Leksell gamma knife or medical uses of the linear accelerators. The basic principle is to use numerous focused radiation beams from different directions in order to deliver the maximum possible radiation dose to the tumor (place where the beams intersect) while delivering less than lethal dose to the surrounding tissue.
These techniques have been limited mostly to brain tumors, because:
a) getting to them surgically can cause significant damage, and b) the head can remain fixed during the procedure
What's new about the Cyberknife is that it can be used on internal organs that move as the patient breathes and his heart beats, two things you can't make stand still using general anesthesia.
Don't get your hopes up that this is something that will bring great improvements to tumor treatments. It won't. Surgery, followed by chemical therapy or radiation (to kill any malign cancer cells that have spread), is still considered the golden standard in most cases.
Tumor treatment has been improving incrementally. Your chances of surviving if you have a malign tumor are much greater than they were fifty years ago. But they still suck. Don't expect anything revolutionary until somebody finds a way (tailor-made virus or a tweak to your immune system) to kill just the tumor cells without killing healthy tissue.
This will get modded down or up as funny as anything mentioning Microsoft here, but I have to say it: Vista will work fine.
I have a five year old old HP TC1100 tablet that has a 1.1 GHz Celeron inside. I use it for web surfing, reading and watching TV shows or movies when I take my dog to the park. It had XP Tablet PC edition on it.
Two months ago the hard disk died (I'm pretty hard on hardware) so I decided to try Vista, which I heard has an improved UI for tablet PCs. So I went out and bought a gig of RAM for $40 thus upgrading the computer to 1.5 gigs. I replaced the hard disk with an ancient 4200 IDE disk I had in a drawer somewhere. Then I installed Vista.
Verdict: Big improvement. Vista really does the whole Tablet PC thing better and the computer with the new RAM feels more responsive than it ever did.
> Open source is not about being anti-competitive-business. > If I had to simplify it down to that > level it'd be closer to anti-customer/end_user-abuse.
Not to nitpick, but isn't open source about sharing your source with others so that they can learn and contribute?
> It's perfectly reasonable for a company to be very pro-open > source without giving away everything.
Depends on the license. GPL, which is what all the cool kids are using these days, is corrosive: You publish your library as GPL, oops, now you have to publish all your programs that use that library as GPL.
As for other licenses, they are more business friendly, but still problematic from a standpoint of a software company. If you plan to make a buck from selling software, then why give other people your source code so that they can compile it and make it available to others for free?
So if you are a software company, then if you publish anything it's the stuff that tangential to your core business. And if you are a public company you pray the god that whatever you are giving away doesn't become next year's big thing because then the shareholders may crucify you because you gave away something that would make them a lot of money off for free.
> If Google can make a zillion-to-one ratio by their contributions > to things like Firefox it's win-win for both them and their customers.
Google has a three-fold business interest in doing that:
1. They don't want Microsoft to control the users browsing experience so they are sponsoring the alternatives.
2. They pay Mozilla to make Google their default search engine from the default home page.
3. They play nice with Mozilla because they don't want to find themselves in a world where an ad-blocker is shipped with FireFox by default. They said in their IPO documents that something like that would be the kiss of death for them.
None of these is about their customers (people paying for ad clicks), it's a about their business interests.
> Beyond Trolling, do you have a point? You've said nothing to show > how the GP was incorrect: Some people high up in Microsoft have > finally realized that it would be financially advisable at this > point to start being nice to their customers, who have come to > expect such treatment thanks to companies like Google.
I disagree. Being a customer of both Microsoft and Google, I've never felt shafted by either company. Both are there to make money off me and I'm there to use their products and services when I chose to. If they can make a buck off me, they try to. Neither particularly cares about me or treats me "nice".
There are people that did get shafted by both companies. Which with these two companies being large and doing lots of things is normal.
But this is not about customers, the posting was about open source. 99.9 percent of both companies customers don't give a fuck about their relationship with the open source world.
Both companies participate the open source scene to a very small degree. Google does it mostly because as a service company it makes direct business sense, Microsoft does it to clean up their image and lessen the number of people that will bad mouth it to paying customers purely because it's Microsoft.
Microsoft is doing this as a PR move. It will never be anything more than that because it doesn't make business sense as long as they are in the business of selling software.
> Of course, the powers that be at Microsoft may have finally > seen the writing on the wall and felt the pressure from Google > enough to alter their strategy a bit.
So Google has open sourced its search engine? Cause all I've seen them open source is some fluff plus some contributions to projects that they use in order to provide their services (where the ratio between them receiving and giving is about zillion to one). No open sourcing of their golden eggs.
So please Slashdotters, stop being such bitches for Google and Apple. Try to understand that for-profit companies have only two relationships with the GPL license: If they provide services or sell hardware, they love it. They can piggy back on the stuff others have built and make a buck. If they sell software, then they hate GPL because selling GPL'ed software is damn hard. (Not impossible, but hard.)
Microsoft is playing nice with open source for three reasons:
1. Microsoft is working very hard to improve its image. Look at the number of lawsuits they have settled in the last few years vs. the 90's and you'll see a company that's trying very hard not to get any bad press.
2. Regulators have squeezed Microsoft's balls to publish their protocols and file formats and play nice with others.
3. Corporations that they sell a lot of licenses to demand they interop well with other operating systems and applications that they use.
This may be a stupid question, but if ISPs are looking to save on bandwidth, why don't they turn on IPv6? IPv6 multicast solves the problem of efficient 1:N distribution way better than P2P apps.
Have a large file you want to distribute and want to do so using 2mbps of bandwidth? Pump the file in parallel using 1mbps, 512kbps, 256kbps, 128kbps, 64kbps and 32kbps so that people with all kinds of pipes can download it, and pump it in a loop. Add some amount of redundancy to each stream, and you are good to go.
It's even easier for real-time content such as TV and radio, as a dropped packet here and there is no biggie.
"I also wonder why closed source vendors don't open their code. They don't have to release it under the GPL, they can reatain all their copyrights, just publish the source. How could it hurt them? They retain copyrights and presumably patents so it's not like anyone could copy them."
It's much more complex than you make it out to be, for a number of reasons.
- Litigation is expensive. A number of people/companies _will_ steal your code (or parts of your code) and proving that in court is very expensive and time consuming. I speak from experience.
- Your code may contain cool techniques your competitors might not be using. Why clue them in?
- Microsoft specific: The moron factor. Giving people source code makes it easier for them to base their code on stuff that's an implementation detail. And then when you change that implementation detail those applications and people claim your next version of operating system is crap because application X they use doesn't run on it.
In case of Microsoft, I wager the moron factor is the most important. Two reasons:
1. Over the years they've gotten smarter and started exporting DLL entry points for their internal stuff as ordinals instead of names.
2. MVPs and other groups do get the source code to Windows.
This being SlashDot I'm going to get heavily modded down, but let me try anyway:
What you described is not capitalism, it's the efficient markets model that's nothing more than that - a simple model that is useful for doing economic/financial calculations. It doesn't really reflect the real world all that well.
FOSS _is_ a lot like (original, Marx) communism, but with a twist.
Communism began with the idea that the working class could make the world a better place by basically doing away with money. Everybody would do their best to produce goods for others, and everybody would basically take only those goods that they needed.
But nature doesn't work that way, so a step in between Socialism was invented with a lot of hand-waving idealism to cover the fact that the economics behind communism and socialism are unsound and unworkable. The only reason why they worked for a while was because morals are a stronger behavior influence than economics.
FOSS began with a more practical (and workable) goal: instead of always writing software from scratch, let's all publish our source code and then somebody can build on it and we all benefit.
That idea was simple and beautiful, and had it stayed in non-for-profit circles I'm sure nobody could say anything bad about it.
However, a lot of people wanted to use open source to make money or to take revenge on companies that make money from software. This is the point where things got ugly because of one fundamental problem: If you make software free as in speech, it's hard not to make it free as in beer. This is the reason why the total value of companies selling FOSS stuff is only a fraction of value of companies that sell commercial software (even excluding Microsoft).
Thus the FOSS tally:
Winners:
1. Everybody that wrote a piece of FOSS for fun or to scratch their own itch or for academic purposes.
2. Companies like IBM and Google that make money by building on the free stuff that others have written.
3. End-users who get stuff for free.
Losers:
1. People that write a piece of FOSS with the sole purpose of replacing a no-lock-in commercial piece of software with a "me too" product. Being driven by ideals or greed, they rarely meet their goal but still waste a lot of time that could otherwise be used productively. GIMP is a good example of this.
2. Programmers that feed their family from writing software but end up in the sights of people from the previous paragraph.
Gaaaa! Your high school teacher taught you wrong too.
Bernoulli's principle doesn't have to do much with flight. Read about the Coanda effect somewhere (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Coanda%20effect)
My first instinct when an international company traded in Dollars announces record profits is to see how the exchange rates changed between the two quarters.
In this case MS got a large boost by the weaker Dollar. But in no way does it account for a 79% increase in profits from the last quarter.
So let's look at what can account for MS getting huge profits:
1. They've gotten leaner. There were no layoffs and salaries are a large chunk of their expenses, so that's not it.
2. They've cut expenses by not printing DVDs and manuals and instead having people DL their software. That could be a part of it.
3. The number of computers sold has increased. Don't have the numbers but possible due to weak dollar making computers cheaper.
4. They've increased prices. Probably. We know their retail price for Vista is way larger than the retail price for XP but they sell only a small fraction through retail, and I doubt the OEMs would budge so easily without giving DOJ a call. Not likely.
5. They stopped hemoraging money on XBOX and Live. Possible.
All this of course doesn't mean that their long-term outlook is favorable. Cheap hardware makes the TCO of machines lower but also puts the pressure on OS prices. Everybody's down on them and is thus more aware of the alternatives like Macs and Linux.
It's doubtful they can ever again be a growth company. The number of PCs being sold each year is slowing down and that was their main driving force.
Although if they are going down because of some disruptive innovation like cellphones replacing computers it's going to take a long, long time. They've basically achieved a cockroach status just like IBM. You can be sure that Linux or Mac won't kill them.
I'm don't know much about other areas but when it comes to programming languages MS has been pretty good at moving stuff from research to production.
I've been following Don Syme's work for a couple of years. Here's a guy that wrote the foundation for CLR generics, then he created F# which is now being moved into production.
Or take a look at Comega which laid the foundation for C# 3.0 and will probably also form a foundation for pragmatic parallelism in C# 4.0.
Or take a look at the Task Parallel Library which does some cool research topics like task stealing that I haven't seen implemented anywhere else yet.
When it comes to other MS software I don't see much improvement but I use very few MS products. The Office Ribbon definitely looks like a giant improvement over the toolbars and menus but that's cosmetic.
The depressing thing is that I see way more cool stuff coming out of Microsoft than from the GPL-loving crowd. FireFox 3.0, provided that it delivers on better bookmarks management, may be the first big thing I've seen in years. OpenOffice is still a bad clone of MS Office, Thunderbird is a giant fucking disappointment (how a product may be worse than Outlook or Outlook Express is beyond me), and the multi-protocol chat clients have more switches than a Boeing 747.
So how about something that impresses us you GPL-loving freaks?;) Take something like face recognition which has been proved to have too many errors to be useful for finding terrorists at airports and create an awesome application that can tag my pictures by people who are in them automatically.
> As an aside, why is this the case when there is so much good research on practical lock-free algorithms? What's with the Erlang guys?
We all use lock-free whenever possible. In the end it's not always possible. If your locks are uncontested there's not much difference though - the most expensive part of a spin lock is the read memory barrier.
Also, most of the lock-free stuff relies on many small allocations (keeping stuff in linked lists instead of arrays for examples) so there is a price to be paid in data locality, AFAIK.
> If you're talking about massive scalability, then not having the option of changing a field in a data structure without allocating and initializing a separate copy first sounds like an expensive proposition. It's bad for memory locality (cache performance), it's bad for heap fragmentation...
Agreed minus the heap fragmentation part. That problem is pretty much fixed by modern GCs and a small amount of careful programming when the objects grow big enough to be allocated in the large object heap.
However if you are going to be passing copes of your data to other lightweight threads frequently then the cost of immutable data structures is less than the cost of copying.
> There's a time and a place for immutable data structures, but programming in languages where that's the only option is pretty limiting.
Agreeing with you 100%. Not so much limiting as... slow.:)
Native stacks are cool and fast. We all love them.
However if you create a native thread per logical unit (say per user connected to a server) then you'll quickly run out of x86 address space and die an ugly death.
This is why runtimes like Erlang use ligthweight threads instead of native threads, and more or less allocate stack frames on the heap. Then you can create 200,000 threads without sweat to feed and read 100,000 clients.
On x64 the situation is better because of a larger address space, but even there native stacks are paged into physical memory using 2K pages. And using 2K instead of 100 bytes that a real stack would take means that your 200,000 threads are using 2K * 200k = 400M of physical memory just for stacks.
But wait, it gets even worse. Say you are writing a server to handle financial markets. Then you want to allocate a lightweight thread per symbol so that lock contention (and locks are used internally for queues even for languages with message passing primitives such as Erlang) is minimal and the work can be spread evenly among CPUs. Then you get a _really_ large number of lightweight threads and the number of those 2k pages that really store 100 bytes of data starts to really hurt.
The rules of the performance game are way different when you are dealing with massive parallelism. This is the reason why many concepts from functional languages, such as immutable data structures, are making a comeback.
> This makes multi-core programming almost a no-brainer.
What uttermost and complete crap.
We are nowhere near multi-core programming being a no-brainer.
Here's what we know right now:
1. We know how to manually create threads to perform specialized tasks. This comes nowhere near the ideal which is loading all the CPUs roughly the same, taking in account CPU affinity for some tasks in order to keep the caches warm and work well on NUMA architectures.
2. We know how to exploit data parallelism in those cases where we have large quantities of data.
Other than that we are still trying to find any paradigm that would make arbitrary systems scale well on a massive number of cores. Some of them are based on pi calculus, some on join calculus, some on more practical foundations.
At this point some things are obvious:
1. CPU threads are useless except as part of the foundation on which other abstractions are built. All really scalable systems use either lightweight threads/processes or smaller tasks which are scheduled in user space.
2. Native stacks are evil.
3. Thread affinity, as implemented by Windows USER and GDI modules and STAs is evil. Don't know how this works under Linux as I never did any GUI work there but I assume many components have similar limitations.
4. Any solution that exposes locks to the user instead of hiding them in the infrastructure is evil. Locks are not composable are very error-prone in real-world scenarios.
Most of the people I hear griping about IE are web designers. So here's some news for you dudes and dudettes: Most of us don't give a flying fuck about rounded corners, alpha transparency, HTML 4.0 and whatever it is you're crying about.
You ladies and gentlemen have been screwing up the web much worse than IE for longer than I can remember. It took us five years to convince you that pretty animations done in Flash are an impediment to using a website and not a cool feature. Now that knowledge has mostly managed to enter your thick skulls so instead you are trying to make stuff on our web pages move using JavaScript and dynamic HTML. I hope there's a special circle of Hell reserved for you.
Instead we, the real users, care only about two things:
1. Security, 'cause we actually check our bank accounts using the browser.
2. Handling bookmarks and snippets, cause there's so much interesting stuff on the web that we want to save for later.
When it comes to security IE is still lousy, although that thing where they remove all the fun security tokens on startup is pretty good and I wish FireFox would do it because it is also pretty insecure.
When it comes to handling bookmarks and snippets all the web browsers are still a steaming pile of shit. It's been - what? - 13 years since Netscape introduced bookmarks and nobody has presented a saner way to organize information even though the number of web sites has grown from 2,738 in '94 to over 100 million today.
> Yeah, all those end users that need a C++ compiler, god dammit.
Nope, I was just giving an example that was clear and simple to illustrate a point.
> Holy shit, you're a stupid motherfucker.
You must feel brave now. Energized. Oh wait. It doesn't require much courage to send insults over the Internet.
> KDevelop doesn't contain a compiler, that's GCC's job to provide.
What's the point of installing KDevelop by default if it can't be used for much without other packages that are not installed by default?
Don't answer that. That was a rhetorical question. Your level of discourse, which shows neither good manners nor a sense of humor, doesn't make you a desirable partner in a conversation.
1. There are numerous free C++ compilers for Windows. 2. MS C++ compiler + SDK are free. 3. Visual C++ Express is free.
But that's besides the point. I used KDevelop to demonstrate Linux distributions' lack of fit and finish, not to debate whether I should pay for software.
Every time somebody says that Linux is ready for the desktop, an angel gets burned in the fires of hell.
Linux distributions are easy install. But it doesn't matter as a metric much because ninety percent of the people don't install their OS but get it with their computer. Rather, the problem lies elsewhere:
Linux distributions lack fit and finish, that _other_ 90% of software development. We all prefer our stuff to "just work" out of the box. Linux doesn't.
Here's an example: Last time I installed Debian, I ran KDevelop. I wrote a "hello world" C++ app to test the waters. It wouldn't compile [or link, can't remember]. How the fuck do you ship a C++ IDE and have hello world not compile? It took me a few minutes to find what package to apt-get in order to get that working.
Linux kernel is OK. Drivers are getting to be OK. But there are a _lot_ of details missing.
Jesus fucking Christ, some people on Slashdot cannot hear the word Microsoft, a company of fifty thousand people with a shitload of diverse opinions, without thinking everything they do is part of some incredibly complex Machiavellian plan.
How about a simpler explanation:
Programmers: Hey Microsoft, we want the source code so we can step through it. Java already ships with library source and that's awesome.
Scott Gu: Sure, makes sense. Yo Ballmer, can I give them the source?
Ballmer: No, competition will learn our secrets for it.
Scott Gu: They already can see the source using Reflector, plus most of the runtime using the Rotor source. This would just let them debug easier thus making their life on Windows easier thus increasing the number of apps that run well on Windows thus increasing Windows sales.
Ballmer: OK then. I like more salez.
Ballmer: Developerz, developerz, developerz.
Scott Gu: OK, here's the source dudez.
Programmers: About fucking time! Thanks dude, this is great news for us.
Slashdot morons: It's a conspiracy! Didn't you see The Ring? Whoever sees the source dies seven days later.
Slashdot Mirror
> Personally, I think that's all a bit tinfoil-hat, but it's always possible.
Everything is possible. This is why intelligent people, when speculating, talk about what is very probable.
> No, no, no. The GPL is an agreement between the author and another
> person. The GPL does not prohibit the author from making any other
> agreement she wants with any other person.
I'm not sure I'm reading GPL the same way you are. To me it seems like a contract between code producer(s) and consumer(s). AFAIK the law doesn't really make much difference if the two are the same, though that's a rather rare case (the notable case happening a few months ago when Wells Fargo sued itself).
But that's academic. As you noted, as long as you are the only one creating and using a library, you don't really need a license. But if you release a library as GPL, then accept somebody else's patch that patched code is GPL. And you can't use it in your own non-GPL product.
> You don't want to license your code under the GPL, because it would
> force the recipient to abide by the terms of the GPL? Okay, I'll grant
> that one.
Phew, thanks. :)
But seriously, yes, that's my main point here. I don't like when GPL is sprung on me, so I don't spring it on other people.
> That's not "embrace, extend, extinguish." ...
>
> In EEE, you (E1) take a popular protocol, one that allows several
> products to interoperate happily. You release your own product using
> that protocol. Next, when your market share is great enough, you add
> undocumented "features" (E2) that make your tools more useful, while
> causing competing products to go "WTF?" Finally, you hope, people
> start using your product exclusively (E3), in order to ensure that
> everything works.
For me that's no different than what FireFox did to IE with the, for example, Ctrl-K shortcut that takes you to the search bar. Only we are talking mindshare, not protocols, but IMO that binds even stronger.
(Side note: when I tried to use IE8 for a few days I got frustrated because Ctrl-K doesn't do the same thing as in FireFox. I found it amusing that Microsoft got their tactics turned on them and made the same mistake WordPerfect and Lotus made in not emulating the better sides and UI of their competitor but instead decided to create their own standards. Good luck with that.)
> Microsoft did it with Kerberos, they did it with ActiveX,
> and they're even now trying to do it with ODF.
ActiveX is the main reason why I think embrace & extend is overplayed here. The playbook is:
1. Use a protocol or something.
2. Become dominant.
3. Extend it.
4. Fuck over all the others that don't know how to reverse engineer it or are too proud to do it.
But #2 is overlooked here, or done with handwaving about monopolies. And while Microsoft's distribution channel used to dominate before the age of the Internet (and still does for operating systems), it can't make an inferior product dominant. ActiveX clearly demonstrates that.
Also, if you remember the late nineties, the Java guys and the Netscape guys were all saying that Microsoft is dead because the web is the new OS (whatever that means). So what do you think Microsoft should have done? Suck Sun's and Netscape's dick or fight back?
> Because the GPL would be a good defense against them storming in
> and wiping out your entire niche? MS has done it several times,
> and tried it a dozen more.
Dude. I run a small software shop. I'm not on Microsoft's radar. So you are saying that out of some fear of them I should screw all other programmers like me who are trying to make a living selling software?
> But you should at least understand what the GPL is before you decide
> whether to use it (or, more to the point, before you go on a public forum
> and spread misinformation about the GPL in the course of explaining why
> you won't use it)
I think I did understand it. Possibly I'm wrong. Your scolding above seems to indicate that you hold no such reservations. Funny, that.
Dejan
> You're saying that you wrote a bunch of libraries yourself,
> included those libraries in your own commercial products,
> then released them under BSD because releasing them under
> the GPL would have forced the GPL-ification of the products?
Yes. Ditto for anybody else who wants to use my libraries.
> That's not how it works. You own the copyright, you can use
> the code as you like, including packing it into proprietary
> products. The hoops you're complaining about having to jump
> through are imaginary.
Not really if I'm reading GPL correctly. What I _think_ you are saying is that since I'm the one writing the code and setting the rules for the license I can put out a license saying "this is under GPL for anybody but me" or something to that account, but that's not really GPL but a modification or a dual license.
But more important, people that use my library would effectively be forced to use GPL. As somebody that creates and sells software, that's exactly what I don't like done to me. I never was one of the kids to take their ball and go home because they don't like how the game is played. (And yes, I do send patches back to any libraries I use even when they are not GPL.)
> It's one thing to be okay with others making money off your code.
> It's another thing to be okay with another company pulling an "embrace,
> extend, extinguish" on you
People here use that phrase a lot, but I think it's an oversimplification. While I have seen MS do crazy shit (the original MFC license comes to mind), in the case of the browser, people forget how shitty Netscape was. IE won because it was a better product at that time.
Also, embrace & extend is a pretty good page for any software shop's playbook. For example, adding load & save for competing (closed source) product file formats to Word and Excel was a stroke of brilliance. FireFox, for example, did a similar thing when they supported IE's shortcut keys from day zero, and I applauded that move when switching to it. I wish more open-source GUI products did the same thing when trying to compete with the market leader.
But back to my main point: I don't spend one moment thinking about MS or Apple when releasing a library. Why would I screw all the people trying to make a living selling software just because of two companies?
Dejan
> That's what the LGPL is for.
That's what almost any open source (plus numerous closed-sourced) license except GPL is for. But the topic of this thread is GPL, so I was commenting on that.
Dejan
GPL is good for anybody not making money directly off software products. I don't buy all the ideology around it, but as Linus says it's a cool license because it enforces tit-for-tat.
However, GPL is the kiss of death for anybody trying to make money selling software products. If you have a software product and publish any of its libraries as GPL, then your product must effectively become GPL'ed. And you put hard work into it and want to charge money for that, but anybody can take that product and sell it cheaper or give it away for free.
You can then play games to work around it (spawn the GPL product from a commercial one and talk to it through a pipe or something) but whatever you do is just a kludge in order to dance around the license.
Personally, I gave away the few small, well-rounded libraries I made under the BSD license. I don't really mind if somebody takes them and uses them to build a product they'll be making money off. The knee-jerk reaction here is that when somebody says "commercial software" people imagine big dominant companies like Apple or Microsoft, but the number of programmers working there is dwarfed by the number of small 1-5 programmer shops trying to make a living.
In fact, I don't even mind if a programmer at Microsoft takes my source code and uses it in a product. I met a few of them and they are mostly nice folks trying to make the best software they can. If Microsoft shareholders profit to an infinitesimal amount from something I gave away for free, I don't really give a fuck.
Dejan
Windows thread creation costs more than Unix thread creation because it does more. Whether that work is useful to most people is somewhat dubious.
Windows kernel is roughly based on VMS, which at the minimum has a different security model than Unix. The one in Windows is finely-grained, while the Unix one is fairly coarse.*
In addition, a bunch of things in Windows have thread affinity and that has to be set up too. The concept of thread affinity for things like windows is pretty good for a desktop OS, fairly lousy for a server one.
Dejan
* Windows security model is more powerful than Unix's user/group/world one (ask any large corporation admin), but comes at a significant performance and complexity price. I can teach any programmer the Unix security model in less than a minute, but I know very few Windows programmers that know anything about Windows ACL/SID/Token APIs. (Yes, ma, that's that last parameter in all those calls that you always set to NULL to inherit from the thread settings.)
We used something similar to kill my daughter's (benign) brain tumor that was in an inoperable location, so unfortunately I know a lot about the subject.
Devices like this have been used for decades to treat brain tumors. Search for Leksell gamma knife or medical uses of the linear accelerators. The basic principle is to use numerous focused radiation beams from different directions in order to deliver the maximum possible radiation dose to the tumor (place where the beams intersect) while delivering less than lethal dose to the surrounding tissue.
These techniques have been limited mostly to brain tumors, because:
a) getting to them surgically can cause significant damage, and
b) the head can remain fixed during the procedure
What's new about the Cyberknife is that it can be used on internal organs that move as the patient breathes and his heart beats, two things you can't make stand still using general anesthesia.
Don't get your hopes up that this is something that will bring great improvements to tumor treatments. It won't. Surgery, followed by chemical therapy or radiation (to kill any malign cancer cells that have spread), is still considered the golden standard in most cases.
Tumor treatment has been improving incrementally. Your chances of surviving if you have a malign tumor are much greater than they were fifty years ago. But they still suck. Don't expect anything revolutionary until somebody finds a way (tailor-made virus or a tweak to your immune system) to kill just the tumor cells without killing healthy tissue.
Dejan
This will get modded down or up as funny as anything mentioning Microsoft here, but I have to say it: Vista will work fine.
I have a five year old old HP TC1100 tablet that has a 1.1 GHz Celeron inside. I use it for web surfing, reading and watching TV shows or movies when I take my dog to the park. It had XP Tablet PC edition on it.
Two months ago the hard disk died (I'm pretty hard on hardware) so I decided to try Vista, which I heard has an improved UI for tablet PCs. So I went out and bought a gig of RAM for $40 thus upgrading the computer to 1.5 gigs. I replaced the hard disk with an ancient 4200 IDE disk I had in a drawer somewhere. Then I installed Vista.
Verdict: Big improvement. Vista really does the whole Tablet PC thing better and the computer with the new RAM feels more responsive than it ever did.
Dejan
> Open source is not about being anti-competitive-business.
> If I had to simplify it down to that
> level it'd be closer to anti-customer/end_user-abuse.
Not to nitpick, but isn't open source about sharing your source with others so that they can learn and contribute?
> It's perfectly reasonable for a company to be very pro-open
> source without giving away everything.
Depends on the license. GPL, which is what all the cool kids are using these days, is corrosive: You publish your library as GPL, oops, now you have to publish all your programs that use that library as GPL.
As for other licenses, they are more business friendly, but still problematic from a standpoint of a software company. If you plan to make a buck from selling software, then why give other people your source code so that they can compile it and make it available to others for free?
So if you are a software company, then if you publish anything it's the stuff that tangential to your core business. And if you are a public company you pray the god that whatever you are giving away doesn't become next year's big thing because then the shareholders may crucify you because you gave away something that would make them a lot of money off for free.
> If Google can make a zillion-to-one ratio by their contributions
> to things like Firefox it's win-win for both them and their customers.
Google has a three-fold business interest in doing that:
1. They don't want Microsoft to control the users browsing experience so they are sponsoring the alternatives.
2. They pay Mozilla to make Google their default search engine from the default home page.
3. They play nice with Mozilla because they don't want to find themselves in a world where an ad-blocker is shipped with FireFox by default. They said in their IPO documents that something like that would be the kiss of death for them.
None of these is about their customers (people paying for ad clicks), it's a about their business interests.
> Beyond Trolling, do you have a point? You've said nothing to show
> how the GP was incorrect: Some people high up in Microsoft have
> finally realized that it would be financially advisable at this
> point to start being nice to their customers, who have come to
> expect such treatment thanks to companies like Google.
I disagree. Being a customer of both Microsoft and Google, I've never felt shafted by either company. Both are there to make money off me and I'm there to use their products and services when I chose to. If they can make a buck off me, they try to. Neither particularly cares about me or treats me "nice".
There are people that did get shafted by both companies. Which with these two companies being large and doing lots of things is normal.
But this is not about customers, the posting was about open source. 99.9 percent of both companies customers don't give a fuck about their relationship with the open source world.
Both companies participate the open source scene to a very small degree. Google does it mostly because as a service company it makes direct business sense, Microsoft does it to clean up their image and lessen the number of people that will bad mouth it to paying customers purely because it's Microsoft.
Microsoft is doing this as a PR move. It will never be anything more than that because it doesn't make business sense as long as they are in the business of selling software.
> Of course, the powers that be at Microsoft may have finally
> seen the writing on the wall and felt the pressure from Google
> enough to alter their strategy a bit.
So Google has open sourced its search engine? Cause all I've seen them open source is some fluff plus some contributions to projects that they use in order to provide their services (where the ratio between them receiving and giving is about zillion to one). No open sourcing of their golden eggs.
So please Slashdotters, stop being such bitches for Google and Apple. Try to understand that for-profit companies have only two relationships with the GPL license: If they provide services or sell hardware, they love it. They can piggy back on the stuff others have built and make a buck. If they sell software, then they hate GPL because selling GPL'ed software is damn hard. (Not impossible, but hard.)
Microsoft is playing nice with open source for three reasons:
1. Microsoft is working very hard to improve its image. Look at the number of lawsuits they have settled in the last few years vs. the 90's and you'll see a company that's trying very hard not to get any bad press.
2. Regulators have squeezed Microsoft's balls to publish their protocols and file formats and play nice with others.
3. Corporations that they sell a lot of licenses to demand they interop well with other operating systems and applications that they use.
Dejan
IPv4 multicast is a joke. It's basically useful only on a local network. IPv6 multicast is much saner and can be used on the internets. ;)
This may be a stupid question, but if ISPs are looking to save on bandwidth, why don't they turn on IPv6? IPv6 multicast solves the problem of efficient 1:N distribution way better than P2P apps.
Have a large file you want to distribute and want to do so using 2mbps of bandwidth? Pump the file in parallel using 1mbps, 512kbps, 256kbps, 128kbps, 64kbps and 32kbps so that people with all kinds of pipes can download it, and pump it in a loop. Add some amount of redundancy to each stream, and you are good to go.
It's even easier for real-time content such as TV and radio, as a dropped packet here and there is no biggie.
What am I missing?
"I also wonder why closed source vendors don't open their code. They don't have to release it under the GPL, they can reatain all their copyrights, just publish the source. How could it hurt them? They retain copyrights and presumably patents so it's not like anyone could copy them."
It's much more complex than you make it out to be, for a number of reasons.
- Litigation is expensive. A number of people/companies _will_ steal your code (or parts of your code) and proving that in court is very expensive and time consuming. I speak from experience.
- Your code may contain cool techniques your competitors might not be using. Why clue them in?
- Microsoft specific: The moron factor. Giving people source code makes it easier for them to base their code on stuff that's an implementation detail. And then when you change that implementation detail those applications and people claim your next version of operating system is crap because application X they use doesn't run on it.
In case of Microsoft, I wager the moron factor is the most important. Two reasons:
1. Over the years they've gotten smarter and started exporting DLL entry points for their internal stuff as ordinals instead of names.
2. MVPs and other groups do get the source code to Windows.
This being SlashDot I'm going to get heavily modded down, but let me try anyway:
What you described is not capitalism, it's the efficient markets model that's nothing more than that - a simple model that is useful for doing economic/financial calculations. It doesn't really reflect the real world all that well.
FOSS _is_ a lot like (original, Marx) communism, but with a twist.
Communism began with the idea that the working class could make the world a better place by basically doing away with money. Everybody would do their best to produce goods for others, and everybody would basically take only those goods that they needed.
But nature doesn't work that way, so a step in between Socialism was invented with a lot of hand-waving idealism to cover the fact that the economics behind communism and socialism are unsound and unworkable. The only reason why they worked for a while was because morals are a stronger behavior influence than economics.
FOSS began with a more practical (and workable) goal: instead of always writing software from scratch, let's all publish our source code and then somebody can build on it and we all benefit.
That idea was simple and beautiful, and had it stayed in non-for-profit circles I'm sure nobody could say anything bad about it.
However, a lot of people wanted to use open source to make money or to take revenge on companies that make money from software. This is the point where things got ugly because of one fundamental problem: If you make software free as in speech, it's hard not to make it free as in beer. This is the reason why the total value of companies selling FOSS stuff is only a fraction of value of companies that sell commercial software (even excluding Microsoft).
Thus the FOSS tally:
Winners:
1. Everybody that wrote a piece of FOSS for fun or to scratch their own itch or for academic purposes.
2. Companies like IBM and Google that make money by building on the free stuff that others have written.
3. End-users who get stuff for free.
Losers:
1. People that write a piece of FOSS with the sole purpose of replacing a no-lock-in commercial piece of software with a "me too" product. Being driven by ideals or greed, they rarely meet their goal but still waste a lot of time that could otherwise be used productively. GIMP is a good example of this.
2. Programmers that feed their family from writing software but end up in the sights of people from the previous paragraph.
Dejan
Gaaaa! Your high school teacher taught you wrong too.
Bernoulli's principle doesn't have to do much with flight. Read about the Coanda effect somewhere (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Coanda%20effect)
Dejan
My first instinct when an international company traded in Dollars announces record profits is to see how the exchange rates changed between the two quarters.
In this case MS got a large boost by the weaker Dollar. But in no way does it account for a 79% increase in profits from the last quarter.
So let's look at what can account for MS getting huge profits:
1. They've gotten leaner. There were no layoffs and salaries are a large chunk of their expenses, so that's not it.
2. They've cut expenses by not printing DVDs and manuals and instead having people DL their software. That could be a part of it.
3. The number of computers sold has increased. Don't have the numbers but possible due to weak dollar making computers cheaper.
4. They've increased prices. Probably. We know their retail price for Vista is way larger than the retail price for XP but they sell only a small fraction through retail, and I doubt the OEMs would budge so easily without giving DOJ a call. Not likely.
5. They stopped hemoraging money on XBOX and Live. Possible.
All this of course doesn't mean that their long-term outlook is favorable. Cheap hardware makes the TCO of machines lower but also puts the pressure on OS prices. Everybody's down on them and is thus more aware of the alternatives like Macs and Linux.
It's doubtful they can ever again be a growth company. The number of PCs being sold each year is slowing down and that was their main driving force.
Although if they are going down because of some disruptive innovation like cellphones replacing computers it's going to take a long, long time. They've basically achieved a cockroach status just like IBM. You can be sure that Linux or Mac won't kill them.
Dejan
I'm don't know much about other areas but when it comes to programming languages MS has been pretty good at moving stuff from research to production.
I've been following Don Syme's work for a couple of years. Here's a guy that wrote the foundation for CLR generics, then he created F# which is now being moved into production.
Or take a look at Comega which laid the foundation for C# 3.0 and will probably also form a foundation for pragmatic parallelism in C# 4.0.
Or take a look at the Task Parallel Library which does some cool research topics like task stealing that I haven't seen implemented anywhere else yet.
When it comes to other MS software I don't see much improvement but I use very few MS products. The Office Ribbon definitely looks like a giant improvement over the toolbars and menus but that's cosmetic.
The depressing thing is that I see way more cool stuff coming out of Microsoft than from the GPL-loving crowd. FireFox 3.0, provided that it delivers on better bookmarks management, may be the first big thing I've seen in years. OpenOffice is still a bad clone of MS Office, Thunderbird is a giant fucking disappointment (how a product may be worse than Outlook or Outlook Express is beyond me), and the multi-protocol chat clients have more switches than a Boeing 747.
So how about something that impresses us you GPL-loving freaks? ;) Take something like face recognition which has been proved to have too many errors to be useful for finding terrorists at airports and create an awesome application that can tag my pictures by people who are in them automatically.
Dejan
> As an aside, why is this the case when there is so much good research on practical lock-free algorithms? What's with the Erlang guys?
:)
We all use lock-free whenever possible. In the end it's not always possible. If your locks are uncontested there's not much difference though - the most expensive part of a spin lock is the read memory barrier.
Also, most of the lock-free stuff relies on many small allocations (keeping stuff in linked lists instead of arrays for examples) so there is a price to be paid in data locality, AFAIK.
> If you're talking about massive scalability, then not having the option of changing a field in a data structure without allocating and initializing a separate copy first sounds like an expensive proposition. It's bad for memory locality (cache performance), it's bad for heap fragmentation...
Agreed minus the heap fragmentation part. That problem is pretty much fixed by modern GCs and a small amount of careful programming when the objects grow big enough to be allocated in the large object heap.
However if you are going to be passing copes of your data to other lightweight threads frequently then the cost of immutable data structures is less than the cost of copying.
> There's a time and a place for immutable data structures, but programming in languages where that's the only option is pretty limiting.
Agreeing with you 100%. Not so much limiting as... slow.
Dejan
Native stacks are cool and fast. We all love them.
However if you create a native thread per logical unit (say per user connected to a server) then you'll quickly run out of x86 address space and die an ugly death.
This is why runtimes like Erlang use ligthweight threads instead of native threads, and more or less allocate stack frames on the heap. Then you can create 200,000 threads without sweat to feed and read 100,000 clients.
On x64 the situation is better because of a larger address space, but even there native stacks are paged into physical memory using 2K pages. And using 2K instead of 100 bytes that a real stack would take means that your 200,000 threads are using 2K * 200k = 400M of physical memory just for stacks.
But wait, it gets even worse. Say you are writing a server to handle financial markets. Then you want to allocate a lightweight thread per symbol so that lock contention (and locks are used internally for queues even for languages with message passing primitives such as Erlang) is minimal and the work can be spread evenly among CPUs. Then you get a _really_ large number of lightweight threads and the number of those 2k pages that really store 100 bytes of data starts to really hurt.
The rules of the performance game are way different when you are dealing with massive parallelism. This is the reason why many concepts from functional languages, such as immutable data structures, are making a comeback.
Dejan
> This makes multi-core programming almost a no-brainer.
What uttermost and complete crap.
We are nowhere near multi-core programming being a no-brainer.
Here's what we know right now:
1. We know how to manually create threads to perform specialized tasks. This comes nowhere near the ideal which is loading all the CPUs roughly the same, taking in account CPU affinity for some tasks in order to keep the caches warm and work well on NUMA architectures.
2. We know how to exploit data parallelism in those cases where we have large quantities of data.
Other than that we are still trying to find any paradigm that would make arbitrary systems scale well on a massive number of cores. Some of them are based on pi calculus, some on join calculus, some on more practical foundations.
At this point some things are obvious:
1. CPU threads are useless except as part of the foundation on which other abstractions are built. All really scalable systems use either lightweight threads/processes or smaller tasks which are scheduled in user space.
2. Native stacks are evil.
3. Thread affinity, as implemented by Windows USER and GDI modules and STAs is evil. Don't know how this works under Linux as I never did any GUI work there but I assume many components have similar limitations.
4. Any solution that exposes locks to the user instead of hiding them in the infrastructure is evil. Locks are not composable are very error-prone in real-world scenarios.
Dejan
Most of the people I hear griping about IE are web designers. So here's some news for you dudes and dudettes: Most of us don't give a flying fuck about rounded corners, alpha transparency, HTML 4.0 and whatever it is you're crying about.
You ladies and gentlemen have been screwing up the web much worse than IE for longer than I can remember. It took us five years to convince you that pretty animations done in Flash are an impediment to using a website and not a cool feature. Now that knowledge has mostly managed to enter your thick skulls so instead you are trying to make stuff on our web pages move using JavaScript and dynamic HTML. I hope there's a special circle of Hell reserved for you.
Instead we, the real users, care only about two things:
1. Security, 'cause we actually check our bank accounts using the browser.
2. Handling bookmarks and snippets, cause there's so much interesting stuff on the web that we want to save for later.
When it comes to security IE is still lousy, although that thing where they remove all the fun security tokens on startup is pretty good and I wish FireFox would do it because it is also pretty insecure.
When it comes to handling bookmarks and snippets all the web browsers are still a steaming pile of shit. It's been - what? - 13 years since Netscape introduced bookmarks and nobody has presented a saner way to organize information even though the number of web sites has grown from 2,738 in '94 to over 100 million today.
Amazing.
Dejan
> Yeah, all those end users that need a C++ compiler, god dammit.
Nope, I was just giving an example that was clear and simple to illustrate a point.
> Holy shit, you're a stupid motherfucker.
You must feel brave now. Energized. Oh wait. It doesn't require much courage to send insults over the Internet.
> KDevelop doesn't contain a compiler, that's GCC's job to provide.
What's the point of installing KDevelop by default if it can't be used for much without other packages that are not installed by default?
Don't answer that. That was a rhetorical question. Your level of discourse, which shows neither good manners nor a sense of humor, doesn't make you a desirable partner in a conversation.
Dejan
Bullshit.
1. There are numerous free C++ compilers for Windows.
2. MS C++ compiler + SDK are free.
3. Visual C++ Express is free.
But that's besides the point. I used KDevelop to demonstrate Linux distributions' lack of fit and finish, not to debate whether I should pay for software.
Dejan
Every time somebody says that Linux is ready for the desktop, an angel gets burned in the fires of hell.
Linux distributions are easy install. But it doesn't matter as a metric much because ninety percent of the people don't install their OS but get it with their computer. Rather, the problem lies elsewhere:
Linux distributions lack fit and finish, that _other_ 90% of software development. We all prefer our stuff to "just work" out of the box. Linux doesn't.
Here's an example: Last time I installed Debian, I ran KDevelop. I wrote a "hello world" C++ app to test the waters. It wouldn't compile [or link, can't remember]. How the fuck do you ship a C++ IDE and have hello world not compile? It took me a few minutes to find what package to apt-get in order to get that working.
Linux kernel is OK. Drivers are getting to be OK. But there are a _lot_ of details missing.
Dejan
Jesus fucking Christ, some people on Slashdot cannot hear the word Microsoft, a company of fifty thousand people with a shitload of diverse opinions, without thinking everything they do is part of some incredibly complex Machiavellian plan.
How about a simpler explanation:
Programmers: Hey Microsoft, we want the source code so we can step through it. Java already ships with library source and that's awesome.
Scott Gu: Sure, makes sense. Yo Ballmer, can I give them the source?
Ballmer: No, competition will learn our secrets for it.
Scott Gu: They already can see the source using Reflector, plus most of the runtime using the Rotor source. This would just let them debug easier thus making their life on Windows easier thus increasing the number of apps that run well on Windows thus increasing Windows sales.
Ballmer: OK then. I like more salez.
Ballmer: Developerz, developerz, developerz.
Scott Gu: OK, here's the source dudez.
Programmers: About fucking time! Thanks dude, this is great news for us.
Slashdot morons: It's a conspiracy! Didn't you see The Ring? Whoever sees the source dies seven days later.
Dejan