Doesn't this sound a little like what people were saying a year ago when Napster (and p2p in general) was taking off? There were a lot of smug proclamations that p2p was "unstoppable", and the government was powerless to the stop massive, open exchange of digital content.
Well, it sure didn't take long to push it back underground, once the RIAA set its mind to it. If Microsoft did something to *really* anger the government, the table would turn rather quickly.
In my area they sell these as "Video stabilizers" or similar. The box has a "Do not duplicate copyright material" warning, below which is a schematic for connecting two VCRs to copy tapes.
The unit itself is a black box with two RCA leads ("in" and "out") and they take a 9v battery inside. The board inside doesn't look that complicated, though the labels are removed from most of the ICs. They retail (here, in Canada) for about $15.
They do work. When you copy a tape there aren't any Macrovision-type artifacts, though the usual VHS-to-VHS copy quality loss is there.
The Mac OS is an example of how closed source succeeds... Closed source produces real clunkers and true works of art.
While I can't say that I've ever been overwhelmed by the Mac GUI, I will stipulate that the MacOS is a good example of a UI.
However I don't think that MacOS's closed source was intrinsic to its (technical/aesthetic) success. Apple could do something similar to Mozilla, where the development process is open but the final decision as to what goes into The Official MacOS(r) would remain with Apple.
With Navigator 5, Netscape is likely to continue to use and bundle closed source and proprietary modules and plugins, such as Sun's JVM.
Also, very large (corporate) open source projects like Mozilla tend to have only a small corps of developers outside of the company itself. There are lots of people who pull the source from the CVS tree and maybe try a build or two, but the active developers are few and far between.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't this sound a little like what people were saying a year ago when Napster (and p2p in general) was taking off? There were a lot of smug proclamations that p2p was "unstoppable", and the government was powerless to the stop massive, open exchange of digital content.
Well, it sure didn't take long to push it back underground, once the RIAA set its mind to it. If Microsoft did something to *really* anger the government, the table would turn rather quickly.
In my area they sell these as "Video stabilizers" or similar. The box has a "Do not duplicate copyright material" warning, below which is a schematic for connecting two VCRs to copy tapes.
The unit itself is a black box with two RCA leads ("in" and "out") and they take a 9v battery inside. The board inside doesn't look that complicated, though the labels are removed from most of the ICs. They retail (here, in Canada) for about $15.
They do work. When you copy a tape there aren't any Macrovision-type artifacts, though the usual VHS-to-VHS copy quality loss is there.
The Mac OS is an example of how closed source succeeds ... Closed source produces real clunkers and true works of art.
While I can't say that I've ever been overwhelmed by the Mac GUI, I will stipulate that the MacOS is a good example of a UI.
However I don't think that MacOS's closed source was intrinsic to its (technical/aesthetic) success. Apple could do something similar to Mozilla, where the development process is open but the final decision as to what goes into The Official MacOS(r) would remain with Apple.
With Navigator 5, Netscape is likely to continue to use and bundle closed source and proprietary modules and plugins, such as Sun's JVM.
Also, very large (corporate) open source projects like Mozilla tend to have only a small corps of developers outside of the company itself. There are lots of people who pull the source from the CVS tree and maybe try a build or two, but the active developers are few and far between.
--Pete