Sony makes overpriced proprietary solutions. You can get the same functionality with off-the-shelf components for less than half the cost. Or just wait until these features are mainstream and ship with more standard home PCs.
Just another in a long series of cases that prove that if you have a trademark, you have the right to any domain name that contains those letters in that order.
There is more involved here than just similarity of names. In this case, you have a product that is closely related to the trademark holder's product, and there is a significant possibility for confusion. That's probably why they lost.
If "Aimster" was a device for hunters or a water pistol, AOL would have much less of a claim and probably would have lost this one.
It's odd to me that the shoe is on the other foot now. When DVD manufacturers try to limit what users can do through closed source drivers and cryptographic means, everybody is up in arms about that. With open source drivers, open hardware specs, and the ability of users to improve drivers, it is inevitable that someone implements "see through" 3D rendering. So, what is it, are we committed to open source ideals and the ability of users to modify the software that they are using, or do we prefer closed source, proprietary software and hardware?
As for the effects on multiplayer gaming, I actually think they could be positive. If you play games with people you know and trust, you don't have to worry about cheating: people play for the fun of it, and cheating would only spoil that. People who do cheat are unlikely to develop those kinds of relationships, since their opponents will notice. And if you play at LAN parties, you can make sure people don't cheat. So, it seems to me that the possibility of having modified drivers really just encourages people to be more social.
Re:We 'share', and you grant us back all your 'wor
on
Shared Source?
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I dunno, that part sounds not too different from some self-proclaimed "open source" companies that "dual license": they give away a free version of their software to non-commercial users, but any improvements that you contribute and want incorporated into their distribution, you have to sign over to them, and the improvements then get sold as part of their commercial product.
Re:MS Tactic to end reverse-engineering?
on
Shared Source?
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· Score: 2
The fundamental requirement for the guys who create the competing/replacement/compatible product is that they must never have viewed any of the original source (if it's software) or viewed the original drawings or workings if it's a machine.
While it is certainly prudent and simplifies a future legal defense, I don't see any such requirement in the law (but IANAL). Sometimes specific source licenses attempt to add clauses that specify this, but it remains to be seen how well the would hold up.
But, still, you are probably right to the degree that Microsoft may see this as a legal advantage. After all, what do they have to lose by "sharing" their source code without giving up any of their commercial rights? Sharing code traps people into copying bits and pieces of it and thereby "infecting" free source code, and it also encourages people to rely on undocumented features, both actions that are very much to Microsoft's advantage.
Microsoft doesn't need such a long statement about their philosophy, it can be summed up pretty succinctly: (1) we (Microsoft) take every step we can to make you dependent on our software, including sharing source code with you that encourages you to use undocumented APIs, and (2) given the additional cost that would create if you wanted to switch to a competitor, we can charge you a lot more for our products than we could in a free, competitive market.
Some open source licenses are viral, that is, they require that all derivative works be licensed on the same terms as the original program.
And most "shared source" and "commercial" licenses are viral and infectious; that is, if you write your own software using that kind of software, you either have to pay runtime licenses yourself, or your customers will have to purchase the infecting product themselves.
In their defense, though, Mundie is saying that it's a choice, and it's a choice Microsoft has made.
At issue isn't Microsoft's choices, at issue is that they are kicking their FUD and PR machineries into high gear, trying to paint open source software as somehow un-American, anti-free-market, and anti-innovation. But it is Microsoft that has interfered with the free market and it is Microsoft that has failed to innovate. What they are really afraid of is finally having a real competitor that they can't conquer with sleazy business tactics or glitzy marketing. Welcome to the free market, Microsoft.
Rather than revolutionary, I think this book describes pretty traditional ideas in UI design and proposes somewhat superficial applications of results from psychology and congnitive science. For example, while attention and automation matter, the implication that interfaces shouldn't be modal is unjustified: lots of things in the real world are modal, and people deal just fine with them. In fact, while modality may have some cost, it also has benefits, and whether it is part of a good UI depends on the tradeoffs. Similarly, Fitts's law and other experimental results are often used in UI design far beyond their actual significance.
The really controversial idea, though, is to abandon applications altogether. There would be only the system, with its commands, and the users' content. Even file-hierarchies should vanish along with the applications, according to Raskin.
I don't see anything controversial about that. There were several systems that mostly behaved that way before the Macintosh. The idea was to eventually move towards a system with persistent object store and direct manipulation of objects, eliminating the need for applications and allowing easy reuse among applications. Generally, the way that was implemented at the time (early 1980's) was via "workspaces" in which all data and objects lived, together with implementations in safe languages that allowed code to co-exist in a single address space.
What killed this approach was, in fact, the Macintosh, later copied by Microsoft. Using Pascal and later C++ as its language made it very difficult for "applications" to safely coexist or to share data in memory. The Macintosh and Windows merely put a pretty face on a DOS-like system of files and applications.
I'd still recommend reading Raskin's book. It does have historical significance, and it gives you a good idea of what mainstream thinking in UI design is. Raskin himself, of course, has contributed significantly to the state of the art and the body of knowledge he describes. There are some ideas in there that are probably not so widely known and that may be helpful.
But don't turn off your brain while reading it and don't take it as ghospel truth. UI design is not a science, and many of the connections to experimental results are tenuous at best. And a lot more goes into making a UI successful than how quickly a user can hit a button. If anybody really knew how to design a UI that is significantly better in practice than what we have, it would be obvious from their development of highly distinctive, novel systems and applications.
The fact is the open source software is part of this economy. It is based on, and protected by, intellectual property laws, just like Microsoft Windows. Open source software is simply a different way of distributing software development efforts efficiently. Open source software has costs and risks associated with it, and customers in our free market economy choose free software if its benefits outweigh its costs.
Arguments about the size and significance of the software industry are also misleading. Oil spills can also contribute significantly to our GNP. That doesn't make them desirable. Or we could start charging for the air we breathe and add a lot of activity to our economy. Microsoft is trying to insert themselves into every possible way in which we communicate, and that should be almost as repulsive an idea as charging for the air we breath.
What is particularly irksome about Mundie's statements is his claims about how the GPL "debases the currency of ideas and labor". The primary "debasing" I have seen in this industry is Microsoft's claim to have invented and innovated in lots of areas where they have mainly copied from competitors and open source software. Ironically, a lot of the ideas that Windows is based on were, in fact, developed by people deeply involved in open source efforts.
What it comes down to is that all this whining by Microsoft about "intellectual property" and "innovation" is merely an expression of their fear: Microsoft has been reaping enormous profits with a faulty product, developed based on the inventions of others. In part, those were disequillibrium wages--artificially high, temporary profits. In part, they have been able to maintain them through questionable business practices. Microsoft is afraid of competing in the real world, where margins are razor thin. Just like IBM, Ford, and other formerly grand companies, Microsoft needs to come back to reality sooner or later. If it weren't open source that brought them back to reality, it would be something else.
Don't bet on it. The intent behind these watermarking systems is that they survive digital-to-analog conversions and can be detected by any recording device, analog or digital. Besides, who says that ten years from now, you'll still be able to get digitizers or televisions with analog inputs? If all broadcasts and recordings go digital, why would anybody still offer analog devices for sale at a reasonable price?
In a worst-case scenario, any player or recording device, analog or digital, will refuse to play or record something unless it is explicitly marked, by a watermark, as "free to play" or "free to record". Furthermore, those cryptographic tokens would be handed out by a central authority, for a steep fee if you aren't Disney or AOLTW. For viewing, you would have to get decryption tokens via the telephone or Internet in order to be able to actually watch the content, giving the media companies a complete record of your viewing habits.
The end result would be that you would lose all rights to home recording or time shifting. Furthermore, any independent producer of content would have to pay for the privilege of distributing their content in a form that is viewable by the installed base of televisions and audio devices.
The political arguments are also foreseeable. Media companies will likely argue that they are entitled to controlling what you are viewing because they somehow "supported" or "subsidized" the creation of those digital television. They will say that they aren't really bound by any privacy laws, and that, in any case, obtaining records of the complete viewing habits of every television viewer will just be used to give viewers more of what they want. And 20-30 years from now, people who grew up in that kind of environment will wonder what all the fuzz was about.
Let's hope it won't go that far. We already have a glimpse of the kind of content and public life that would occur in such a world, and it doesn't look good.
I'm sure htis will be marked as a troll by some people, but where exactly does our right to "fair use" come from?
The same place that copyright comes from: from our legislatures. You see, unlike your rights to life and physical property, you don't have an inalienable right to own content or ideas. Instead, copyrights and patents are established by law for the purpose of encouraging people to create content and inventions and share it. If we don't like those systems, we can, for practical purposes, abolish them legislatively; it shouldn't even require amendments to the constitution.
Of course, given the enormous politicial power that the media industry wields and the political apathy of the US voters, it is unlikely that anything is going to happen any time soon to curtail these "digital land grabs".
I kind of have stopped worrying about it: the people that seem most insistent on "protecting" their content (Metallica, Disney, etc.) seem to be producing mostly junk anyway. The more difficult and expensive they make it for their content to be accessed, the better as far as I'm concerned. The good stuff (classic books, art created for art's sake, live music, etc.) tends to be free or not rely on copyrights for its revenue model.
In my opinion, Nautilus is slow and huge because it was written in C, not despite of it. Using a higher-level language would let people get rid of a lot of bookkeeping code and worry about using better data structures; even using an HLL, they could still go back and translate time-critical inner loops into C or assembly as needed later.
Likewise, the reason that the Gnome component model itself is late is because C has so little built-in support for that kind of functionality. Trying to provide that functionality in a library is a lot of extra work both for the library and for the application developers, and it is never as good as if it is just built-in and enforced by the language.
AFAIK, Microsoft allows you to have non-Microsoft boxes, they just don't have any infrastructure or support for them. That pretty much means that most people at Microsoft end up using Windows for their work, whether it is the technically best platform for their job or not (many people in MS research come from UNIX environments). I think that policy makes perfect sense, btw.
Eazel and other open source companies are missing their time-to-market windows. It may be OK for an X11 version of Emacs to take nearly a decade to come out, or for a Linux kernel to take a long time. But that's because those projects are truly open source and not intertwined with some revenue model. If it takes a year longer, nobody loses money and nobody goes out of business (although some users may switch to something else). But Eazel and similar companies need to deliver software fast in order to get revenue from their services. They can't afford to spend years fiddling around with their software.
You can have your own guesss how time to market can be reduced. My personal view is that they should at least have written their software in a different language, maybe Java or Python. That would by no means guarantee fast time-to-market or frewer bugs, but it at least removes some obstacles.
The problem was the services and file manager took far too long to come together.
A predictable problem, given that they were trying to do much of it in C/C++. When will people learn that if time to market are a primary concern, they should use languages and tools that reduce time needed for development, debugging, and testing? Use C/C++ for small, focussed, specific, compute-intensive tasks.
Perl4 to Perl5 was a real improvement. I had hopes that Perl6 might fix many of the idiosyncracies in Perl5. But it seems to add more junk to the language without helping much. $*ARGS is chomped? $ARGS prompts("Search?");? That isn't the kind of functionality that is complex enough to warrant new, oddball language constructs, and Perl5 has perfectly good constructs for those cases. And in addition to that, Perl6 also introduces lots of subtle incompatibilities with Perl5. As far as I'm concerned, Perl6 is shaping up to be the worst of both worlds: incompatibility and mess. Thanks for the heads-up: as a long-time Perl user, this really convinces me that it's time to switch.
Given the large amount of work that goes into putting huge amounts of data online like patents and court records, a minor fee likely is approriate for accessing these records.
Even if it was just for internal document management purposes, it would be cheaper for the US government to scan documents than to route them around in paper form. A fast Internet connection costs a significant amount of money when purchased in the free market, but the US government has negotiated contracts for free Internet services based on giving companies access to public infrastructure to put in fiber, etc., and the cost to Internet providers is small.
In comparison, the cost of maintaining large public buildings with huge amounts of publically accessible paper records, plus the staff to maintain them, is very high.
So, no, altogether, I don't see why access to public records over the Internet should cost any money. Even if such access is provided in addition to the physical locations, the incremental cost is tiny. And if such access is provided to replace some physical locations, we could save a lot of money. It is time for the US government to stop thinking of computerized access as a luxury and to start thinking of it as a way to make more public records available to more people at a lower cost.
Trolltech has never had the intention to screw up KDE or free software. Trolltech always accepted patches and even gave official permission for some alternate distributions.
Without KDE, Qt would be a poor-tool C++ toolkit with almost no user community, and it would be one among many. The only reason Troll Tech is known at all is KDE. And the only reason Troll Tech has been so accomodating to KDE is because they know that.
I can understand why you were wary of KDE for doing so, but in the end it looks to me like that trust was just well-placed.
What I see is an opportunistic company that hasn't given an inch, that has tried to mislead people about licensing issues, and that has tried to shut down the Harmony project with legal threats. I don't trust Troll Tech, and that alone makes Qt software I wouldn't touch.
As many posts already have speculated, maybe KDE will become the standard X desktop?
I don't think there will ever be a "standard desktop". KDE is already old technology: a big, complex C++ system with a Windows 95-like interface. It is useful, but the next generation of GUI technology needs to be developed now. And it is being developed. You are always going to see multiple desktops side-by-side on Linux.
In fact, you also do on Windows, it is simply camouflaged better.
The problem is a lot of people don't trust the KDE team's judgement. This is residue from when QT was a "source under glass" library. Yes, that has now been fixed, [...]
I don't think it actually has been fixed. Qt is more expensive than an MSDN subscription, and anybody wanting to develop commercial or even non-open GUI software for Linux needs to buy it. It is quite unattractive for Sun or IBM or other companies to throw their weight behind that kind of toolkit.
I think any GUI toolkit aspiring to become "the standard" on Linux needs to be LGPL or BSD licensed. That is not a question of right or wrong, it's a question of making Linux reasonably acceptable in the real world.
Re:Good riddance to yet another bad business model
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Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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If you think that KDE/Qt is going to survive any better, you are kidding yourself. Qt's license makes it uninteresting for adoption by companies like Sun and IBM, and Qt's development is proprietary. Furthermore, big, messy C++ programs aren't much easier to maintain than big, messy C programs.
In fact, I think it's silly to think that any of the current desktops, whether Windows, MacOS, Gnome, or KDE, are going to be around for more than a few years. Enjoy Gnome and KDE as they are for now (I am), but don't expect them to be any kind of long-term solutions.
This is why I've seen very little success in the customers who have chosen the "free software" route. It is not free, it has to be adapted to suit your needs. I, on the other hand, provide both the software and the services to go along with it, and no, I cannot survive on "support".
Quite true: free software has costs. And your potential customers determine, rationally, whether the costs of free software are larger or smaller than the costs of your product.
If your potential customers conclude that the costs associated with free software are smaller than what you charge, they will choose free software unless you lower your prices. If you can't lower your prices and stay in business, you are not an efficient participant in the market and you should go out of business. The free market does not guarantee that you get an honest wage for an honest day's worth of programming: if you produce the wrong product or if you work inefficiently, your labor is worthless. That's the way the free market works and that's how the free market eliminates inefficient players.
Approximate matching should not be patentable either. Checksumming, fingerprinting, approximate matching, and content-based matching are all obvious ideas for retrieving CD information, at least to people who have been working in the field (that is, in the field of multimedia databases). Specific content-based matching methods perhaps should be patentable, but a lot of the more common ones were developed many years ago.
I still think that giving away competing products for free removes the incentives for making a business out of it. At least I have experienced that.
If someone figures out how to sell the same product as yours cheaper (free in this case), of course your incentive should go away; that's the way the free market works. That's why people who start businesses generally try to have a diversified product line and look very seriously at issues like cost of entry.
Thinking that you can drive a serious business on poeple's donation and good will of a few % of the population is just foolish.
If that's your idea of how free software gets created, you are confused. Free software isn't usually created out of "good will" or from "[charitable] donations", it is usually created by real businesses to address real needs.
For example, a lot of free software is in-house software that was created because commercial software licenses were more expensive than in-house development, or because the commercial software didn't do what the user needed. Once created, it is often economically rational for the creator of that software to share it freely (and derive benefits from community-based enhancement and support) rather than to incur the overhead of trying to build a business around it.
Free software is already at a serious disadvantage compared to commercial software: there is little support, little documentation, and no marketing. If your product can't compete with that, I think it really doesn't deserve to be around. I mean, what value are you adding?
On the other hand, if you can't beat them, join them: many companies are willing to pay handsomely for consulting, support, and documentation. Consider offering those services for the competing free software system, or freely distribute your own system and offer those services for it.
This is based on some sort of idealism, not capitalism.
The idea of free software may have been born out of idealism, but it wouldn't be succeeding in the marketplace if it wasn't economically rational for all involved.
And not everything that is free and good succeeds; for example, I predict that both TrollTech's Qt and Apple's Darwin will fail in the end as free software projects: while they may be "free" or "open source", the projects do not seem to derive significant benefits from being released that way. In different words, if a free software license makes no economic sense, it won't help the software.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony makes overpriced proprietary solutions. You can get the same functionality with off-the-shelf components for less than half the cost. Or just wait until these features are mainstream and ship with more standard home PCs.
There is more involved here than just similarity of names. In this case, you have a product that is closely related to the trademark holder's product, and there is a significant possibility for confusion. That's probably why they lost.
If "Aimster" was a device for hunters or a water pistol, AOL would have much less of a claim and probably would have lost this one.
As for the effects on multiplayer gaming, I actually think they could be positive. If you play games with people you know and trust, you don't have to worry about cheating: people play for the fun of it, and cheating would only spoil that. People who do cheat are unlikely to develop those kinds of relationships, since their opponents will notice. And if you play at LAN parties, you can make sure people don't cheat. So, it seems to me that the possibility of having modified drivers really just encourages people to be more social.
I dunno, that part sounds not too different from some self-proclaimed "open source" companies that "dual license": they give away a free version of their software to non-commercial users, but any improvements that you contribute and want incorporated into their distribution, you have to sign over to them, and the improvements then get sold as part of their commercial product.
While it is certainly prudent and simplifies a future legal defense, I don't see any such requirement in the law (but IANAL). Sometimes specific source licenses attempt to add clauses that specify this, but it remains to be seen how well the would hold up.
But, still, you are probably right to the degree that Microsoft may see this as a legal advantage. After all, what do they have to lose by "sharing" their source code without giving up any of their commercial rights? Sharing code traps people into copying bits and pieces of it and thereby "infecting" free source code, and it also encourages people to rely on undocumented features, both actions that are very much to Microsoft's advantage.
Microsoft doesn't need such a long statement about their philosophy, it can be summed up pretty succinctly: (1) we (Microsoft) take every step we can to make you dependent on our software, including sharing source code with you that encourages you to use undocumented APIs, and (2) given the additional cost that would create if you wanted to switch to a competitor, we can charge you a lot more for our products than we could in a free, competitive market.
And most "shared source" and "commercial" licenses are viral and infectious; that is, if you write your own software using that kind of software, you either have to pay runtime licenses yourself, or your customers will have to purchase the infecting product themselves.
At issue isn't Microsoft's choices, at issue is that they are kicking their FUD and PR machineries into high gear, trying to paint open source software as somehow un-American, anti-free-market, and anti-innovation. But it is Microsoft that has interfered with the free market and it is Microsoft that has failed to innovate. What they are really afraid of is finally having a real competitor that they can't conquer with sleazy business tactics or glitzy marketing. Welcome to the free market, Microsoft.
The really controversial idea, though, is to abandon applications altogether. There would be only the system, with its commands, and the users' content. Even file-hierarchies should vanish along with the applications, according to Raskin.
I don't see anything controversial about that. There were several systems that mostly behaved that way before the Macintosh. The idea was to eventually move towards a system with persistent object store and direct manipulation of objects, eliminating the need for applications and allowing easy reuse among applications. Generally, the way that was implemented at the time (early 1980's) was via "workspaces" in which all data and objects lived, together with implementations in safe languages that allowed code to co-exist in a single address space.
What killed this approach was, in fact, the Macintosh, later copied by Microsoft. Using Pascal and later C++ as its language made it very difficult for "applications" to safely coexist or to share data in memory. The Macintosh and Windows merely put a pretty face on a DOS-like system of files and applications.
I'd still recommend reading Raskin's book. It does have historical significance, and it gives you a good idea of what mainstream thinking in UI design is. Raskin himself, of course, has contributed significantly to the state of the art and the body of knowledge he describes. There are some ideas in there that are probably not so widely known and that may be helpful.
But don't turn off your brain while reading it and don't take it as ghospel truth. UI design is not a science, and many of the connections to experimental results are tenuous at best. And a lot more goes into making a UI successful than how quickly a user can hit a button. If anybody really knew how to design a UI that is significantly better in practice than what we have, it would be obvious from their development of highly distinctive, novel systems and applications.
Arguments about the size and significance of the software industry are also misleading. Oil spills can also contribute significantly to our GNP. That doesn't make them desirable. Or we could start charging for the air we breathe and add a lot of activity to our economy. Microsoft is trying to insert themselves into every possible way in which we communicate, and that should be almost as repulsive an idea as charging for the air we breath.
What is particularly irksome about Mundie's statements is his claims about how the GPL "debases the currency of ideas and labor". The primary "debasing" I have seen in this industry is Microsoft's claim to have invented and innovated in lots of areas where they have mainly copied from competitors and open source software. Ironically, a lot of the ideas that Windows is based on were, in fact, developed by people deeply involved in open source efforts.
What it comes down to is that all this whining by Microsoft about "intellectual property" and "innovation" is merely an expression of their fear: Microsoft has been reaping enormous profits with a faulty product, developed based on the inventions of others. In part, those were disequillibrium wages--artificially high, temporary profits. In part, they have been able to maintain them through questionable business practices. Microsoft is afraid of competing in the real world, where margins are razor thin. Just like IBM, Ford, and other formerly grand companies, Microsoft needs to come back to reality sooner or later. If it weren't open source that brought them back to reality, it would be something else.
In a worst-case scenario, any player or recording device, analog or digital, will refuse to play or record something unless it is explicitly marked, by a watermark, as "free to play" or "free to record". Furthermore, those cryptographic tokens would be handed out by a central authority, for a steep fee if you aren't Disney or AOLTW. For viewing, you would have to get decryption tokens via the telephone or Internet in order to be able to actually watch the content, giving the media companies a complete record of your viewing habits.
The end result would be that you would lose all rights to home recording or time shifting. Furthermore, any independent producer of content would have to pay for the privilege of distributing their content in a form that is viewable by the installed base of televisions and audio devices.
The political arguments are also foreseeable. Media companies will likely argue that they are entitled to controlling what you are viewing because they somehow "supported" or "subsidized" the creation of those digital television. They will say that they aren't really bound by any privacy laws, and that, in any case, obtaining records of the complete viewing habits of every television viewer will just be used to give viewers more of what they want. And 20-30 years from now, people who grew up in that kind of environment will wonder what all the fuzz was about.
Let's hope it won't go that far. We already have a glimpse of the kind of content and public life that would occur in such a world, and it doesn't look good.
The same place that copyright comes from: from our legislatures. You see, unlike your rights to life and physical property, you don't have an inalienable right to own content or ideas. Instead, copyrights and patents are established by law for the purpose of encouraging people to create content and inventions and share it. If we don't like those systems, we can, for practical purposes, abolish them legislatively; it shouldn't even require amendments to the constitution.
Of course, given the enormous politicial power that the media industry wields and the political apathy of the US voters, it is unlikely that anything is going to happen any time soon to curtail these "digital land grabs".
I kind of have stopped worrying about it: the people that seem most insistent on "protecting" their content (Metallica, Disney, etc.) seem to be producing mostly junk anyway. The more difficult and expensive they make it for their content to be accessed, the better as far as I'm concerned. The good stuff (classic books, art created for art's sake, live music, etc.) tends to be free or not rely on copyrights for its revenue model.
Likewise, the reason that the Gnome component model itself is late is because C has so little built-in support for that kind of functionality. Trying to provide that functionality in a library is a lot of extra work both for the library and for the application developers, and it is never as good as if it is just built-in and enforced by the language.
AFAIK, Microsoft allows you to have non-Microsoft boxes, they just don't have any infrastructure or support for them. That pretty much means that most people at Microsoft end up using Windows for their work, whether it is the technically best platform for their job or not (many people in MS research come from UNIX environments). I think that policy makes perfect sense, btw.
You can have your own guesss how time to market can be reduced. My personal view is that they should at least have written their software in a different language, maybe Java or Python. That would by no means guarantee fast time-to-market or frewer bugs, but it at least removes some obstacles.
A predictable problem, given that they were trying to do much of it in C/C++. When will people learn that if time to market are a primary concern, they should use languages and tools that reduce time needed for development, debugging, and testing? Use C/C++ for small, focussed, specific, compute-intensive tasks.
Perl4 to Perl5 was a real improvement. I had hopes that Perl6 might fix many of the idiosyncracies in Perl5. But it seems to add more junk to the language without helping much. $*ARGS is chomped? $ARGS prompts("Search?");? That isn't the kind of functionality that is complex enough to warrant new, oddball language constructs, and Perl5 has perfectly good constructs for those cases. And in addition to that, Perl6 also introduces lots of subtle incompatibilities with Perl5. As far as I'm concerned, Perl6 is shaping up to be the worst of both worlds: incompatibility and mess. Thanks for the heads-up: as a long-time Perl user, this really convinces me that it's time to switch.
Even if it was just for internal document management purposes, it would be cheaper for the US government to scan documents than to route them around in paper form. A fast Internet connection costs a significant amount of money when purchased in the free market, but the US government has negotiated contracts for free Internet services based on giving companies access to public infrastructure to put in fiber, etc., and the cost to Internet providers is small.
In comparison, the cost of maintaining large public buildings with huge amounts of publically accessible paper records, plus the staff to maintain them, is very high.
So, no, altogether, I don't see why access to public records over the Internet should cost any money. Even if such access is provided in addition to the physical locations, the incremental cost is tiny. And if such access is provided to replace some physical locations, we could save a lot of money. It is time for the US government to stop thinking of computerized access as a luxury and to start thinking of it as a way to make more public records available to more people at a lower cost.
Without KDE, Qt would be a poor-tool C++ toolkit with almost no user community, and it would be one among many. The only reason Troll Tech is known at all is KDE. And the only reason Troll Tech has been so accomodating to KDE is because they know that.
I can understand why you were wary of KDE for doing so, but in the end it looks to me like that trust was just well-placed.
What I see is an opportunistic company that hasn't given an inch, that has tried to mislead people about licensing issues, and that has tried to shut down the Harmony project with legal threats. I don't trust Troll Tech, and that alone makes Qt software I wouldn't touch.
I don't think there will ever be a "standard desktop". KDE is already old technology: a big, complex C++ system with a Windows 95-like interface. It is useful, but the next generation of GUI technology needs to be developed now. And it is being developed. You are always going to see multiple desktops side-by-side on Linux.
In fact, you also do on Windows, it is simply camouflaged better.
I don't think it actually has been fixed. Qt is more expensive than an MSDN subscription, and anybody wanting to develop commercial or even non-open GUI software for Linux needs to buy it. It is quite unattractive for Sun or IBM or other companies to throw their weight behind that kind of toolkit.
I think any GUI toolkit aspiring to become "the standard" on Linux needs to be LGPL or BSD licensed. That is not a question of right or wrong, it's a question of making Linux reasonably acceptable in the real world.
In fact, I think it's silly to think that any of the current desktops, whether Windows, MacOS, Gnome, or KDE, are going to be around for more than a few years. Enjoy Gnome and KDE as they are for now (I am), but don't expect them to be any kind of long-term solutions.
Quite true: free software has costs. And your potential customers determine, rationally, whether the costs of free software are larger or smaller than the costs of your product. If your potential customers conclude that the costs associated with free software are smaller than what you charge, they will choose free software unless you lower your prices. If you can't lower your prices and stay in business, you are not an efficient participant in the market and you should go out of business. The free market does not guarantee that you get an honest wage for an honest day's worth of programming: if you produce the wrong product or if you work inefficiently, your labor is worthless. That's the way the free market works and that's how the free market eliminates inefficient players.
Approximate matching should not be patentable either. Checksumming, fingerprinting, approximate matching, and content-based matching are all obvious ideas for retrieving CD information, at least to people who have been working in the field (that is, in the field of multimedia databases). Specific content-based matching methods perhaps should be patentable, but a lot of the more common ones were developed many years ago.
If someone figures out how to sell the same product as yours cheaper (free in this case), of course your incentive should go away; that's the way the free market works. That's why people who start businesses generally try to have a diversified product line and look very seriously at issues like cost of entry.
Thinking that you can drive a serious business on poeple's donation and good will of a few % of the population is just foolish.
If that's your idea of how free software gets created, you are confused. Free software isn't usually created out of "good will" or from "[charitable] donations", it is usually created by real businesses to address real needs.
For example, a lot of free software is in-house software that was created because commercial software licenses were more expensive than in-house development, or because the commercial software didn't do what the user needed. Once created, it is often economically rational for the creator of that software to share it freely (and derive benefits from community-based enhancement and support) rather than to incur the overhead of trying to build a business around it.
Free software is already at a serious disadvantage compared to commercial software: there is little support, little documentation, and no marketing. If your product can't compete with that, I think it really doesn't deserve to be around. I mean, what value are you adding?
On the other hand, if you can't beat them, join them: many companies are willing to pay handsomely for consulting, support, and documentation. Consider offering those services for the competing free software system, or freely distribute your own system and offer those services for it.
This is based on some sort of idealism, not capitalism.
The idea of free software may have been born out of idealism, but it wouldn't be succeeding in the marketplace if it wasn't economically rational for all involved.
And not everything that is free and good succeeds; for example, I predict that both TrollTech's Qt and Apple's Darwin will fail in the end as free software projects: while they may be "free" or "open source", the projects do not seem to derive significant benefits from being released that way. In different words, if a free software license makes no economic sense, it won't help the software.