I agree, that post was very strange. "Can't play movies without five days of intensive configuration battles" is ridiculous. The true problem is that you can't play some movies AT ALL on Linux, as any knowledgeable Linux user would know, and it WON'T BE FIXED by "five days of intensive configuration battles". Obviously this guy is trying to make it sound like he knows what he is doing so that people can't claim that he is a "moron Windoze user".
For this and many other reasons I believe this post is entirely bogus. MicroSoft should not pay this guy, he blew it.
Actually case-sensitive file systems eliminate the need to "be Unicode" entirely, provided they don't have too many limitations on what characters are allowed in filenames (for instance Unix only has problems with '/' and null). This is because case-sensitivity means the file system does nothing to the filename and it can be treated as an unchanging stream of bytes. This allows higher-level stuff to provide any interpretation desired of those bytes (such as UTF-8 encoding).
As soon as you start interpreting the bytes you have broken any ability to do higher-level things with them.
This is why programmers want case-sensitivity in the file system, not because of some need to name two files "foO" and "FoO".
Nonsense. The "consumer" clicks on files and would not care how it is capitalized and probably would not notice if the filesystem supported multiple files with the same name.
Case independence is a UI issue that has leaked into low-level implementations and is an endless source of bugs and security errors. The id of a file should be a single unique sequence of bytes, and it would help considerably if programs could assumme that unequal sequences meant different files always.
It is probably better to port GTK (and Qt) to Quartz than to emulate all of X. Performance will be far better, graphics will be better, and all modern toolkits hide the Xlib interface so there is no need to emulate it.
No you can't do that because you are violating international and US copyright law!
As everybody has said about a million times here, the GPL is granting you additional rights that you don't have normally! This means that if you don't read it / ignore it / don't like it, you can do less with the software!
Than don't use it! It's exactly like deciding not to sign the NDA that MicroSoft wants for their code. The fact that you don't like their NDA does not mean you can use their code, and it does not mean that "NDA=developer hell" It just means you don't like it, so DON'T USE IT!!!!
The stupidity of you people never ceases to amaze me. Please explain again how the existence of code you can't use is harming you, as I'm sure you are going to say something hilarious.
The GPL adds rights to those you are granted under copyright law as enforced in the US and most contries. If you don't agree to the license, you have less rights than you do before. Therefore there is no reason to not agree to the license.
EULA's remove rights that you would normally have. If you can legally claim that you got this product without agreeing to the EULA, they you would have more rights than before, not less, so you have a motive to try to get out of the agreement.
As everybody else here said, it is called a "dual license" and is absolutely allowed by the GPL!
In fact the GPL is much better for making commercial licenses than public domain. With the GPL you pretty much prevent anybody else from commercializing your software, thus making it easier for you to do so.
Unfortunately some people (MicroSoft) are intent on putting out absolute outright LIES that the GPL is harmful for commercialization, when in fact it is more friendly for commercialization. Except for huge companies like MicroSoft, software developers are helpless to get their stuff standardized and accepted unless they release the source code. The GPL is a way for them to do it yet still have the ability to sell it under a dual license.
Actually the "window manager" is not the culprit. A program can rely on the existence of a window manager, and the interface to window managers is standard.
Probably the code is GUI widgets (although if you are writing portable code you will need to put a lot of stuff on Win32 to get a layer that is reasonable portable) and printer stuff such as fonts that can be asssummed to exist on Windows.
This is true, however they do have a solution: require a watermark in any playback, and outlaw any device that can put on such a watermark. In effect outlaw all recording devices. I believe this is exactly what they want to do, after they prove that all other solutions do not stop piracy.
The side effect that it is now impossible to distribute entertainment (or any information) without a contract with an entertainment company. This is the actual goal of all this legislation.
As I understand it, because of their closed-source implementation, they made a math error such that cracking one key allowed all the others to be cracked easily. Any new design, if they have any brains, will be completely open-source (except for the keys themselves, which means this source is useless for actual OSS users).
But the idea sounds workable if it was done correctly.
I believe this certainly is the goal of the content industries. There is absolutely no way for DRM to work unless machines insist on a watermark on the content, and that this watermark is extremely hard to produce.
Another effect is that recording devices will be illegal. Yea there will probably be closed boxes with timeouts: they will not record watermarked data, but will add a watermark to data, and quit playing that data and erase it after a certain amount of time. But the ability to record your own entertainment and distribute it to friends (or strangers) will not be allowed, as these devices could be used to pirate content (by pointing the camera at the screen).
The real effect of this will of course not be to stop any piracy whatsoever (one stolen watermarking machine is all that is needed), but it will make it impossible for there to be any competing forms of legal distributed entertainment without contracting with the content industries. The RIAA will love this and I very much believe this is their ultimate goal.
Nonsense. By this argument commercial software is useless because it is outdated, too. You don't think the programmers at commercial companies are sitting around doing nothing, do you? They are writing the next version, and thus because this new version exists, the one people are buying is just as outdated as the OSS cd!
The patent covers the writing algorithim. GIMP reads.gif files just fine. I'm not sure what it does when writing, it either refuses (which would be bad) or it writes a non-compressed version (there is an algorithim to write something which the LZW can read but it does not use any patented code). Another possibility when writing is to write a.png file and just claim it is a.gif.
A big problem with making the interface or "features" any good is that 95% of the time, the first question asked about any non-MS office produce is "how well does it import/export MS Office documents". Basically anybody (OSS or not, free or not) competing with MS is at a huge disadvantage as an enormous amount of resources need to be spent reading/writing MS formats, so there is no time left for anything else.
Also it seems that import/export office is the ONLY "feature" people want, take a look at some of the slashdot stories about any OSS word processors, I don't remember seeing any questions about how it works other than "does it import/export office good?"
Even if MS Office formats were fully documented and easily imported and exported, there would be serious problems with implementing features because of the need to store those features in an MS Office file, and limits due to the need to work with MS Office data structures.
I get these warnings all the time from VC++ but it seems they can be ignored. The programs link and run fine. I guess you can't use the symbols in the debugger, but I doubt that the 512-character symbol is really that useful in debugging anyway.
It seems to me if you took a book and rewrote it and printed that out and distribute it, you are in violation of copyright, definately. It would not matter if you claimed you threw your original copy away. You are also in trouble if you xerox the book without modification and distribute that, even if you claim you threw the original away.
However if you took the book, ripped a few pages out, inserted sheets of notes of your own, and gave away or sold that, it seems that you have not violated copyright. This is possibly because it is clear what parts are the original work.
I don't think it was very vigorous. I got 1 piece of email from RMS for fltk. I replied somewhat indicating mild disinterest and I never heard anything else. Certainly a "vigorous" encouragement would be to send some more email.
Too bad for me, actually, as I think it is possible that fltk would have been used instead of gtk as the basis for Gnome. Conversely though I think our explicit statement that static-linking a closed-source program is allowed(somewhat converse to the LGPL) has made fltk popular in it's own right.
Surely if people copy rather than buy, less money goes to the artists, which means fewer artists able to support themselves?
The problem is that you assumme that copying inversely affects buying. There are a lot of reasons why the amount of copying and buying may be uncorreleated or positively correlated.
Some of CDE/Motif was adopted. The ICCCM standards for window managers are from it and still exist and are used by the newest KDE and Qt. They are working on replacements (since the design lacks a lot of modern actions like maximize-vertical) but it is expected that programs using those standards will continue to be recognized and work.
If that is correct then the original poster is correct in that using GDK would do absolutely nothing to make the themes match. I personally don't think it would work even if GDK had a "draw a button" call, it would be as difficult for Qt to be rewritten to use that as to use all of GTK underneath it.
Many old X apps that assummed colormaps will not work on a TrueColor only (or TrueColor default visual) server. Typically they truncated the returned color to 8 bits so the colors they drew were totally wrong. This error is inexcusable (and does not exist in Windows) and is typical of the bad design of X. A sensible system would allow the program to set the current color by rgb values.
Also common is assumming an image could be built in 8 bits per pixel, assumming it could blink everything that was one color by changing a colormap entry, or that various colors could be produced by xor'ing pixels. These would naturally happen if programmers assummed colormaps, and these problems also exist in Windows programs.
In any case the fact that no extension was added for about 10 years is not something X can be proud of. The problem is that everybody who wrote an extension refused to write code to emulate it on old servers, instead insisting that programmers write code to detect and use the extension, and forcing them to emulate the extension if it was not found. It was easier for programmers to just emulate the extension (with modifications they wanted) and ignore it. For this reason nothing appeared for years and years.
Only recently has Xrender been added and started being used commonly. But even there it is a pain, you have to check for the extension and figure out how to draw everything two ways. However Xft (the antialised font stuff) does have the ability to work on systems without Xrender, for this reason almost everybody is working on antialiased fonts, but nobody is using the rest of Xrender.
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This is the only possible scheme that would work.
It would do nothing to stop for-money pirates however, as they could likely get access to or steal an "offical" recording machine.
It would put all independent artists out of business, a point that I'm sure the RIAA is considering, though they won't talk about it.
For this and many other reasons I believe this post is entirely bogus. MicroSoft should not pay this guy, he blew it.
As soon as you start interpreting the bytes you have broken any ability to do higher-level things with them.
This is why programmers want case-sensitivity in the file system, not because of some need to name two files "foO" and "FoO".
Case independence is a UI issue that has leaked into low-level implementations and is an endless source of bugs and security errors. The id of a file should be a single unique sequence of bytes, and it would help considerably if programs could assumme that unequal sequences meant different files always.
It is probably better to port GTK (and Qt) to Quartz than to emulate all of X. Performance will be far better, graphics will be better, and all modern toolkits hide the Xlib interface so there is no need to emulate it.
As everybody has said about a million times here, the GPL is granting you additional rights that you don't have normally! This means that if you don't read it / ignore it / don't like it, you can do less with the software!
The stupidity of you people never ceases to amaze me. Please explain again how the existence of code you can't use is harming you, as I'm sure you are going to say something hilarious.
EULA's remove rights that you would normally have. If you can legally claim that you got this product without agreeing to the EULA, they you would have more rights than before, not less, so you have a motive to try to get out of the agreement.
In fact the GPL is much better for making commercial licenses than public domain. With the GPL you pretty much prevent anybody else from commercializing your software, thus making it easier for you to do so.
Unfortunately some people (MicroSoft) are intent on putting out absolute outright LIES that the GPL is harmful for commercialization, when in fact it is more friendly for commercialization. Except for huge companies like MicroSoft, software developers are helpless to get their stuff standardized and accepted unless they release the source code. The GPL is a way for them to do it yet still have the ability to sell it under a dual license.
Probably the code is GUI widgets (although if you are writing portable code you will need to put a lot of stuff on Win32 to get a layer that is reasonable portable) and printer stuff such as fonts that can be asssummed to exist on Windows.
Open source software is vital for my job and I am fighting for it's success for very selfish reasons.
The side effect that it is now impossible to distribute entertainment (or any information) without a contract with an entertainment company. This is the actual goal of all this legislation.
But the idea sounds workable if it was done correctly.
Another effect is that recording devices will be illegal. Yea there will probably be closed boxes with timeouts: they will not record watermarked data, but will add a watermark to data, and quit playing that data and erase it after a certain amount of time. But the ability to record your own entertainment and distribute it to friends (or strangers) will not be allowed, as these devices could be used to pirate content (by pointing the camera at the screen).
The real effect of this will of course not be to stop any piracy whatsoever (one stolen watermarking machine is all that is needed), but it will make it impossible for there to be any competing forms of legal distributed entertainment without contracting with the content industries. The RIAA will love this and I very much believe this is their ultimate goal.
Nonsense. By this argument commercial software is useless because it is outdated, too. You don't think the programmers at commercial companies are sitting around doing nothing, do you? They are writing the next version, and thus because this new version exists, the one people are buying is just as outdated as the OSS cd!
The patent covers the writing algorithim. GIMP reads .gif files just fine. I'm not sure what it does when writing, it either refuses (which would be bad) or it writes a non-compressed version (there is an algorithim to write something which the LZW can read but it does not use any patented code). Another possibility when writing is to write a .png file and just claim it is a .gif.
Also it seems that import/export office is the ONLY "feature" people want, take a look at some of the slashdot stories about any OSS word processors, I don't remember seeing any questions about how it works other than "does it import/export office good?"
Even if MS Office formats were fully documented and easily imported and exported, there would be serious problems with implementing features because of the need to store those features in an MS Office file, and limits due to the need to work with MS Office data structures.
I get these warnings all the time from VC++ but it seems they can be ignored. The programs link and run fine. I guess you can't use the symbols in the debugger, but I doubt that the 512-character symbol is really that useful in debugging anyway.
It seems to me if you took a book and rewrote it and printed that out and distribute it, you are in violation of copyright, definately. It would not matter if you claimed you threw your original copy away. You are also in trouble if you xerox the book without modification and distribute that, even if you claim you threw the original away.
However if you took the book, ripped a few pages out, inserted sheets of notes of your own, and gave away or sold that, it seems that you have not violated copyright. This is possibly because it is clear what parts are the original work.
Too bad for me, actually, as I think it is possible that fltk would have been used instead of gtk as the basis for Gnome. Conversely though I think our explicit statement that static-linking a closed-source program is allowed(somewhat converse to the LGPL) has made fltk popular in it's own right.
The problem is that you assumme that copying inversely affects buying. There are a lot of reasons why the amount of copying and buying may be uncorreleated or positively correlated.
Some of CDE/Motif was adopted. The ICCCM standards for window managers are from it and still exist and are used by the newest KDE and Qt. They are working on replacements (since the design lacks a lot of modern actions like maximize-vertical) but it is expected that programs using those standards will continue to be recognized and work.
If that is correct then the original poster is correct in that using GDK would do absolutely nothing to make the themes match. I personally don't think it would work even if GDK had a "draw a button" call, it would be as difficult for Qt to be rewritten to use that as to use all of GTK underneath it.
Hardware accelerated OpenGL is probably more important than any other thing to change our ability to use Linux on the desktop.
Also common is assumming an image could be built in 8 bits per pixel, assumming it could blink everything that was one color by changing a colormap entry, or that various colors could be produced by xor'ing pixels. These would naturally happen if programmers assummed colormaps, and these problems also exist in Windows programs.
In any case the fact that no extension was added for about 10 years is not something X can be proud of. The problem is that everybody who wrote an extension refused to write code to emulate it on old servers, instead insisting that programmers write code to detect and use the extension, and forcing them to emulate the extension if it was not found. It was easier for programmers to just emulate the extension (with modifications they wanted) and ignore it. For this reason nothing appeared for years and years.
Only recently has Xrender been added and started being used commonly. But even there it is a pain, you have to check for the extension and figure out how to draw everything two ways. However Xft (the antialised font stuff) does have the ability to work on systems without Xrender, for this reason almost everybody is working on antialiased fonts, but nobody is using the rest of Xrender.